Discuss this page

Adding this option to every page of my site

[nonstop]

I want to add a 'discuss this page' option to all my pages where my users can leave messages about the page they are currently viewing.

does anyone know of any scripts that can do this?

PHP if possible!

many thanks

[deejay]

Don't know of a specific one, but there are plenty out there. Check hotscripts.com - 'ratings and reviews' under the php section.

Almost certainly something there to suit.

[vkaryl]

I think you can do this with various blog packages....

[nonstop]

I had a look on hotscripts and I found a few but they use flatfile text files to store the comments in (erk!) :)

anyone know of any blog packages that I can use?

[vkaryl]

You can find hundreds using google. Including google's own version.

[rogerd]

The software you need depends on the structure of your site. Just about any blog lets you put up a page of content and let visitors add their comments.

If your site architecture wouldn't adapt to a blog format, you might look for a content management system that would offer more structure and flexibility.

A totally different approach (but perhaps useful for some circumstances) would be to pair a content site (either manually or CMS generated) with a forum package. You would then have to manually (or by script) create a forum topic to correspond to each new content topic and cross-link them. The advantage of the full forum approach is that it might lead to the development of a better community, and start discussions on other topics than those that appear on the content pages.

[nonstop]

I might try the forum idea, and hack it to auto generate a forum for each page..

What's the best free php message board system that has mod_rewrite/search engine friendly urls?

[rogerd]

If you go the forum route, don't forget about sending traffic the other way. I.e., in addition to your "Discuss this topic" link on the content page, I'd recommend putting a "Read the article" or "Additional Reading About This Topic" link at the beginning of the forum topic. This will benefit both your visitors and your search engine performance.

[neo_brown]

You should be able to get what you need with a small php script, no more complex than a very basic guestbook script. It may well be easier to write the code yourself from the beginning than trying to hack a forum script.

[nonstop]

True, I was going to write my own, but I like the idea of using a forum to build a community, so i've downloaded phpbb and a mod to make it search engine friendly. just need to hack it now, not sure how hard it will be.. if not I'll write my own.

[vkaryl]

phpBB is fairly easy to hack as long as you aren't wanting to make multiple changes to the same section of any given file. You should be fine....