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About

TheBuzzEngine is a simple commenting system, designed for Google App Engine, as a replacement for DISQUS and similar services.

NOTE: THIS REPO IS CURRENTLY UNMAINTAINED. New development happens at alexandru/buzzengine, but I switched the technological stack (the JVM, Scala, regular RDBMS) and it isn't meant to be deployed on Google's App Engine anymore. If anybody is interested in maintaining this repository, let me know.

Install

  1. download the Google App Engine - Python SDK
  2. create an instance on Google App Engine - check out their docs on Getting Started with Python
  3. fork this repo or download an archive
  4. in appcfg.yml change the "application" (first line) to point to whatever App ID you created
  5. in settings.py change ADMIN_EMAIL + EMAIL_SENDER (see comments)
  6. deploy and go to the homepage, which should look like this one -- check out this doc on how to Upload an Application to GAE
  7. follow the instructions in your app's homepage (you just need to copy a Javascript widget in whatever page you want comments)

Details

I tried to use Disqus for adding commenting to my blog pages; but Disqus is too complex and I needed something simpler:

  • 4 fields: Name, Email, URL + Comment
  • Those 3 author-related fields should be tracked with a cookie and auto-completed
  • Gravatar for user images
  • Moderation (editing or removing) by email
  • Fast, light

TheBuzzEngine is an implementation for the above and it runs on Google's App Engine.

Roadmap

The following features are planned:

  • email subscriptions to replies in a thread
  • threaded replies to comments (only 1 level)
  • Askimet integration for spam filtering
  • better admin (email moderation is OK for low traffic, but better control and filtering required)

Cross-domain, Cross-browser requests

What I did is described in this article: http://alexn.org/blog/2011/03/24/cross-domain-requests.html

Browsers supported

Tested with Chrome 5, Firefox 3.5, Opera 11, IExplorer 8, IExplorer 6.

In IExplorer < 8 the commenting form is disabled (meaning only comments are shown). I may fix this, but incentive for me to fix it for IExplorer 6 is pretty low. If you want IExplorer 6, send me a note and I'll reconsider.

Google App Engine

It's OK for simple stuff like this -- just one problem for this app -- unfortunately if there are no warm instances active, request can take 10 seconds.

Facilities used thus far:

  • datastore
  • memcached
  • tasks queue
  • sending email

License

MIT Licensed. See the LICENSE file for details.