Mephisto commenting system is… how do i put it … outdated :)

And we wanted something more engaging for our blog. Looking around the web we found that Disqus was used all over the place, so we decided to integrate it into our blog instead of the native comments system.

The integration itself was fairly painless, they provide simple html/js snippets that we had to insert into Mephisto liquid templates for our blog.

The problem is that we wanted to completely remove the old commenting system but we didn’t want to loose existing comments on the blog.

So we needed a way to import existing comments to Disqus.

Google to the resque…

And we found this. Jim Mulholland wrote a small sinatra app that accepts blog comments RSS feed and imports the comments to Disqus. Which we didn’t have.

So we decided to write a direct export script instead, after all we don’t need RSS, we have mephisto db right here.

Below is the script. You just need to edit a couple of constants at the beginning and run it from your mepthisto directory like this:

./script/runner path/to/the/importer/script/disqus_import

If you use something other than Mephisto, you can still find it usefull, but it’s up to you to replace the code that retrieves comments from your blog engine.

Enjoy.