Blog Comments with Staticman

08 June 2018 by Martin

Despite not being good at responding to all Comments on my WordPress Blog (I blame the fact that I could never get the email notifications to work from WordPress), I had some good Comments on a number of my posts that I didn’t want to loose. The Jekyll WordPress migration tool copied all the Comments into the front-matter of each post, so it was easy enough to render them under each blog post. But the real issue was how do you allow people to post Comments with a static site? Most of the big blog sites seem to have switched off Comments and instead rely on Social Media. I came up with various ideas involving Twitter and Amazon Lambda, and was about to abandon Comments entirely when I discovered a really elegant solution in a system call Staticman.

Staticman provides a couple of simple HTTP API endpoints that create Git Pull requests to add Comment files to your Git repository inside a Jekyll Collection. That’s a really elegant solution to the problem of Comments, all I have to do to approve a comment is merge the pull request to my Master branch. GitHub even sends me email notifications so I might even be better at responding to Comments in the future. Take a look at my Staticman config file if you want to see how I set it up.

Staticman is very flexible in how you want to organise your Comment collection but I still had the problem of my existing Comments. Rather than treat the old Comments different to any new Comments I wrote a small script in Ruby to create comment YAML files in my chosen collection from Jekyll front-matter. Look in the scripts folder of my sites Git repository if you want to see more.