The discussion revolves around the WP-Discourse plugin’s limitation of only showing either WordPress comments or Discourse comments in a WP post. icaria36 inquires about the possibility of keeping both commenting systems active, allowing WP sites to “federate” their comments with a common Discourse pool while still maintaining their own WP comments.
mpalmer raises concerns about the potential user experience (UX) confusion if both commenting systems are used simultaneously. icaria36 suggests simply appending one set of comments after the other, separate from each other.
simon explains the plugin’s current behavior and offers a potential solution by adding a filter to the logic, allowing users to override the default behavior and display the WordPress comment form even when there are no comments. icaria36 finds this solution acceptable and prefers it over using the JavaScript embedder, which is an alternative option suggested by notriddle.
As far as I can see, WP-Discourse seems to make an exclusive choice between showing WordPress comments or Discourse comments in a WP post. There is an option to show existing WP comments beneath the Discourse ones, but the form to post new WP comments will be removed.
Question: is there a way to keep both commenting systems active? While this doesn’t make much sense for a single WP-Discourse pair, in our setup we have a Discourse that invites WP sites to “federate” their comments in a common Discourse pool, while still aiming to allow these independent WP sites to keep their own WP comments with their own users.
Just appending one set of comments after the other, separate. Out there in the social space, people remix local comments with Facebook comments plugin, Disqus plugin… Not beautiful and polished, but it provides the aggregation of comments that independent publishers (those not giving up and just linking to FB, Twitter, etc) are seeking.
I haven’t put a lot of work into this, because it seems like it’s not used much, but if you select the Show Existing WP Comments option, existing WordPress comments will be displayed if there are any existing WordPress comments. The form to post new comments should also be displayed. If it isn’t being displayed, the issue could be with your theme.
If there are no existing WordPress comments, the WordPress comment form will not be displayed. The plugin has always behaved this way. It wouldn’t be difficult for me to add a filter to the logic there, so that you could override this behaviour.
If the Load Comments With Ajax option is selected, it’s not currently possible to get existing WordPress comments or the WordPress comment form to display.
Thank you for the quick and complete answer, @simon.
An option to show the WP comments form even when there are no comments would be great. The rest should be covered by existing functionality.
@notriddle yes, I am very familiar with the JS embedder. WP-Discourse is superior in so many ways when you can technically use it (self-hosted WP installations only), that it would be a pity to fallback to the JS embedding because of one important detail (the feature requested above).