Entries published on July 16, 2006

1 entry published on this date. See also: all entries published in July 2006, full archive.

Django tips: Hacking FreeComment

Django’s bundled comments application (found in django.contrib.comments) is incredibly useful; it gives you a nice, out-of-the-box system for adding comments to any site. But, if you look at it closely, really feels more like two applications:

1. The Comment model and its helpers, which only allows registered user accounts to post comments.
2. The FreeComment model and its helpers, which allows anyone at all to post comments.

The first one — based around Comment — is much more complex by far, and includes pretty much everything World Online has ever needed for its various news and community sites: reviews, ratings, attached images, reputation over time, flagging of potentially bad content, user bans and groups of moderators who can remove comments. Explaining everything it can do would take several extremely long articles.

The second one — based around FreeComment — is extremely simple, and doesn’t have all the fancy bells and whistles of its big …

Entry published July 16, 2006. Read full entry.