CaCause is a Pelican plugin for managing blog comments. Unlike comment systems like Disqus which carry comments from a third-party platform to the client browser, CaCause make comments part of the static blog. We feel this approach is in line with strong ideas which stand behind static blogs:
- own your data, don't delegate to 3rd-party,
- be able to rebuild the entire blog offline.
How it works
Main idea is that approved comments exist on disk in Markup format and CaCause pluging is called during blog build to embed article pages with related comments. You probably think "that sounds great! But how are created the comments? How is managed the approval process?". Well, that's another chapter of the CaCause story which is still under development. But CaCause plugin for Pelican is the first piece to achieve our goal.
Plugin usage
A sub-directory is dedicated to store comments. Each comment is a file in REST or Markdown format (.rst or .md file extension). The header is used to define comment metadata: author name, author email, web site, published date.
Customize Pelican blog configuration defined in pelicanconf.py
# register cacause plugin
PLUGINS = ['cacause',]
# configure cacause
CACAUSE_DIR = "comments"
CACAUSE_GRAVATAR = True
Parameters:
- CACAUSE_DIR is a directory under Pelican root directory where comments are stored in REST or Markdown format.
- CACAUSE_GRAVATAR is a boolean to enable or disable Gravatar support.
Example
Have a look to this tiny pelican blog