Posted: November 9th, 2011 - A few days ago I tried the default widget for recent comments that Diqus provides, but I just couldn't get it to look like I wanted it. Thus, I decided to look for a different solution and it wasn't long before I noticed the Disqus API. Now let me just say now that I think Disqus did a GREAT job with the creation of the documentation and examples for their api.

For each resource in the Disqus api their is a seperate page where you can send test request with parameters and view the output of the corresponding response. With that said , even with my very limited PHP knowledge it wasn't long before I had a working script. First I will show the whole script and then break it down. There is a download link at the bottom of this post with all the code as a text file. Note: You need to signup with Disqus and register a new application in order to use this script.

Step 1: Add Your Parameters

• commentLimit - Max amount of recent comments you want to fetch.
• dateFormat - Format you want to use for comment post dates. Check php manual for formatting options.
• commentLength - Max character count of comments
• apiVersion - Version of Disqus api
• resource - Disqus resource to grad data from. Probably want to leave this alone.
• outputType - Format of response from Disqus. You'll have to change script if you want to use xml.
• publicKey - Your public Disqus api key.
• forumName - Forum name Disqus identifies your site by.

You'll notice that I split the parameters into two arrays. I think this makes the script more flexible. If you want to add an extra parameter to your Disqus request just add an extra key to the $dqparameter array.

Step 2: Create your request string, send to Disqus and grab the response

All disqus request require an apiversion, resouse, and output type. That's done in the first line above. The second line of code above calls my custom function addQueryStr. It simply takes a base url and array then returns the full url with a query string. The next step is to use the file_get_contents function with the completed request string to get a response. Note the @ in front of file_get_contents. That will suppress a php warning from being displayed if your request fails. Since json was used as the output type when making the request json_decode is called to decode the response. The 2nd parameter in the json_decode function turns objects into associative arrays. The last part of this step was saving the comment objects from the response in the variable $dqComment.

Step 3: Grab Comment Data, Create a String of HTML, Echo HTML String

This is pretty much the last important step. After checking if any comments were returned in the response I then call my custom function echoComments. This function loops over each comment item, grabs the relevant information, and then creates an html string for display. After each iteration the $commenthtml string is added to the $recentComments variable. Almost every element in $commentHtml was given a css class so that I could easily change how my recent comments list looks without changing the script. I have not included my css in this article, but this is the same script that I use on this blog. You could just use firebug to see what I am doing with css.

One important thing to note about the echoComments function is that comment objects do not contain the title of the article that the comment was posted on. Instead each comment object contains the ID number of the thread (blog,article post,etc). Thus another call needs to be made the to the disqus api for the thread title. I use my getThreadInfo function below for exaclty that.

Other, Less Important Parts of Code:
I noticed gravatar images where coming in very small, which made images look pixelated due to my css settings. Thus, I wrote the function below to grab the version of the user's gravatar image that has not been resized. So far it has worked for me, but I have not tested it extensively so let me know if you have any problems with it.

I use a function called noComments in my script for situations where no comments are returned or when I encounter an error.

Hopefully this helps a few people get a recent comment module up quickly on their site. If you use it please let me know how it works out for you.

Update [3/1/2012] : My script was giving the wrong post time values. This is because Disqus does not add the timezone information in the "createdAt" attribute. Without something identifying the current timezone php's strtotime function will not do the proper conversion to the server's default timezone. Since Disqus returns GMT the fix is to add +0000 to the time string.
So strtotime($commentObj["createdAt"]) changes to strtotime($commentObj["createdAt"]."+0000") .
I have already made the change to the code above.

Update [3/30/2012]: I noticed there was extra spacing in the comments coming from this script. This is because Discuss returns the comments as html and not only text. To fix this I added one line to the shortenComment function in the script. $comment = preg_replace("/<.*?>/", "", $comment); I have updated the code in the script.

Attachments:

disqusRecentComments.php.txt

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