Integrating social networks into wordpress native comments

4
votes

I've been looking for the 'perfect' comment system for a wordpress blog I'm working on.

First, there is Disqus/intensedebate/etc... :

Pros: Easy to set up, somewhat customize-able (to a limit), removes load from your server, social.
Cons: Syncing with wordpress can sometimes be a problem, external bugs can ruin your comment flow, there's no fallback for javascript-less users, lots of embedded code.

Then, Wordpress native comments:

Pros: Deeply integrated with the blog, highly customize-able, saves the huge junk of javascript thats being embedded into your blog, easier to provide fallback options
Cons: Not native-ly social, ???

For me, Wordpress comments would seem like the best option.
The only problem is the social integration.

My questions is ;
what do I do with the data I receive by the users AFTER they log into a social network? (I already know how to create the login gate and get the required info back...)
I thought about simply saving their; email, name, picture (which you get from the social network) like what's being done when people comment without a social network...
The problem is I don't have any experience with the wordpress database and I have no idea where to start. Normally my best bet would be to use the wordpress codex but I couldn't find much there.

P.S; Please, no plugins!
There are amazing plugins out there but I love to learn to do stuff by myself.
If someone could just throw some useful links to me or theoretically what needs to be done, I'd be super thankful!

1
wordpress
It's great that you want to learn to do things by yourself - what I can suggest is that you look-up similar plugins and see how they handle the data. Perhaps there could be a tutorial about that as well. Good luck :) – Nikola Ivanov Nikolov
The problem is all 'tutorials' point to plugins... I'll try to check a plugin though :) Thanks! Still looking for some answers though. – Asaf
Sorry, but I'm kind of with Nikola on this one. A good route would be to find a well built and well documented/commented plugin version of what you're trying to do, and then just reverse engineer it. Sometimes going that route actually works surprisingly well, from my experience. – Mike
Ok thank you too, @Mike ! I just found a decent plugin called "Wordpress Social Plugin" which is open source and easy to understand. It uses 'HybridAuth' open source social login API as well :) My question has yet to be answered by this amazing plugin though. It can be found here: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-social-login . Either way, I'll post the answer as soon as I find it. Just in case there are other people like me searching for the same thing. – Asaf

1 Answers

1
votes

I was looking for the same 'solution', but couldn't find a proper answer (like 5 months ago). I recommend the Nextend series of plugins, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Maybe you can look at the code inside this great plugins. Here's the Nextend Facebook Connect http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextend-facebook-connect/ For me is the 'cleanest and unintrusive' way of implementing a social connection for the comments in Wordpress, because you can handle the users as you wish, and the comments template works in the way you want to work. You can look in here http://dfine.me/2012/11/500px-lanza-aplicacion-oficial-para-iphone/ to take a look to the implementation. An article that maybe can help you a little http://www.tutorialstag.com/create-custom-wordpress-registration-page.html maybe with that you can write the 'Social Info' to the Wordpress db.