Some characterize comments as the life of blogs. We believe in having an engaged community. Ever since the launch of our new design, we have been receiving emails about our comments layout. Users are asking what plugins are we using? Instead of creating a separate page for each of those plugins like we did for others on our Blueprint page, we decided to put these together into one page.
Previously we were using Livefyre. After a whole year of using it, we decided to switch away and not try any other hosted comment solutions like Disqus or Facebook Comments. Here are 6 reasons why we switched away from Livefyre.
Now we are using the built-in WordPress comments with a set of plugins that extends the functionality further. You can see the screenshot below with the label of each plugin.
Let us explain what each plugin really does on our website.
Newsletter Sign-Up – This plugin adds the Email Opt-in checkbox below the comments field. It integrates with MailChimp, Aweber, and others. The best part about this plugin is that it lets you add users to a specific list group/segment.
Subscribe to Comments – This plugin adds the checkbox that allows users to get notified for new comments on a specific post.
We did have built-in Twitter and Facebook connect, but we got rid of that altogether mainly to speed up our load time. Not many folks were utilizing the functionality, so it makes more sense to speed up the site for majority of the users.
Some folks have asked how did we style the comments to be that way. Well, we used HTML and CSS. Can’t really teach that on this page. The round gravatar images are actually not round in the beginning. They are default gravatar that is styled to be round. We used the CSS3 property border-radius. There are plenty tutorials on the web that will show you how to do it. Google is your friend 