Comment system

[JeniT]

We need a comment system. We're not keen on Disqus. There are alternatives such as:

• Moot (closed source, hosted)
• Discourse (open source, self-hosted)
• Juvia (open source, self-hosted)

The minimum specs for Discourse are quite high, which concerns me a bit, but it looks impressive. Both Juvia and Discourse would enable us to fork and tweak for our requirements. Discourse looks better.

Whichever we choose we'll probably use it across the ODI web platform, so @Floppy, @pezholio & @pikesley should be involved in making the decision.

[Floppy]

Can discourse be used as a comment-thread system? I was under the impression it was more forum-style.

Also, this will be highly relevant to theodi/shared#44, so I'm going to link it :)

[JeniT]

You're right re Discourse. But maybe we could create a way of embedding a Discourse thread into a page?

There are other options too, such as just adding supports for comments directly into the ODC RoR app and not having a shared hosted arrangement. Given the pages aren't static anyway, perhaps that would be a better route.

[Floppy]

There are many easily-embedded options for commenting in Rails apps, certainly. It might be simpler that way, though we do want to have a unified experience wherever we can, so we should provide similar SSO functionality, etc.

It would be nice to use the same system... hm.

[JeniT]

I assume that commenting is on the pre-October plan for the web platform? Would it be best to put off the implementation in the certificates until that's available? Could it be done in the next sprint or do you have other plans for that?

[Floppy]

It's currently in for Sprint #14, so the one after next.

[Floppy]

But that's purely based on our own ideas; if there are other reasons to bring it forward, we probably could swap it with something like authorship assignment which is in #13.

[JeniT]

It would be great to do that, I think, so that there can be some coordination between the requirements for ODCs and the web platform. @benfoxall & @peterjwest will be around tomorrow so we can discuss a bit then.

[Floppy]

OK, we can discuss in next Monday's planning, but I see no reason why not.

[Floppy]

I think we're converging on setting up a Juvia instance as a minimum viable commenting system to get started with. @benfoxall, do you know of any particular hard requirements for the system, or is a simple no-login comment system enough?

[Floppy]

So, to confirm. We're setting up a Juvia installation, which will live at http://juvia.theodi.org. I've created a gem called juvia_rails which you can use to do an incredibly simple integration with it. @benfoxall, will that work for you? Once we've got it set up, you can point at it to test. We've not done much with style yet, so we might want to add more options to disable the default juvia CSS, for instance.

[Floppy]

The juvia site URL will be in the JUVIA_BASE_URL environment var, and we'll put the site key into CERTIFICATE_JUVIA_SITE_KEY.

[Floppy]

This is now working for you to test out. If you add juvia_rails, and use the environment variables above, it should work. Don't put it live until you talk to @pikesley though :)