Customizing django-comments-xtd

django-comments-xtd can be extended in the same way as django-contrib-comments. There are three points to observe:

1. The setting COMMENTS_APP must be 'django_comments_xtd'.
2. The setting COMMENTS_XTD_MODEL must be your model class name, i.e.: 'mycomments.models.MyComment'.
3. The setting COMMENTS_XTD_FORM_CLASS must be your form class name, i.e.: 'mycomments.forms.MyCommentForm'.

In addition to that, write an admin.py module to see the new comment class in the admin interface. Inherit from django_commensts_xtd.admin.XtdCommentsAdmin. You might want to add your new comment fields to the comment list view, by rewriting the list_display attribute of your admin class. Or change the details view customizing the fieldsets attribute.

Custom Comments Demo

The demo site custom_comments available with the source code in GitHub (directory django_comments_xtd\demos\custom_comments) implements a sample Django project with comments that extend django_comments_xtd with an additional field, a title.

settings Module

The settings.py module contains the following customizations:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
  # ...
  'django_comments_xtd',
  'django_comments',
  'articles',
  'mycomments',
  # ...
)

COMMENTS_APP = "django_comments_xtd"
COMMENTS_XTD_MODEL = 'mycomments.models.MyComment'
COMMENTS_XTD_FORM_CLASS = 'mycomments.forms.MyCommentForm'

models Module

The new class MyComment extends django_comments_xtd’s XtdComment with a title field:

from django.db import models
from django_comments_xtd.models import XtdComment


class MyComment(XtdComment):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=256)

forms Module

The forms module extends XtdCommentForm and rewrites the method get_comment_create_data:

from django import forms
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

from django_comments_xtd.forms import XtdCommentForm
from django_comments_xtd.models import TmpXtdComment


class MyCommentForm(XtdCommentForm):
    title = forms.CharField(
        max_length=256,
        widget=forms.TextInput(attrs={'placeholder': _('title')})
    )

    def get_comment_create_data(self):
        data = super(MyCommentForm, self).get_comment_create_data()
        data.update({'title': self.cleaned_data['title']})
        return data

admin Module

The admin module provides a new class MyCommentAdmin that inherits from XtdCommentsAdmin and customize some of its attributes to include the new field title:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

from django_comments_xtd.admin import XtdCommentsAdmin
from custom_comments.mycomments.models import MyComment


class MyCommentAdmin(XtdCommentsAdmin):
    list_display = ('thread_level', 'title', 'cid', 'name', 'content_type',
                    'object_pk', 'submit_date', 'followup', 'is_public',
                    'is_removed')
    list_display_links = ('cid', 'title')
    fieldsets = (
        (None,          {'fields': ('content_type', 'object_pk', 'site')}),
        (_('Content'),  {'fields': ('title', 'user', 'user_name', 'user_email',
                                  'user_url', 'comment', 'followup')}),
        (_('Metadata'), {'fields': ('submit_date', 'ip_address',
                                    'is_public', 'is_removed')}),
    )

admin.site.register(MyComment, MyCommentAdmin)

Templates

You will need to customize the following templates:

• comments/form.html to include new fields.
• comments/preview.html to preview new fields.
• django_comments_xtd/email_confirmation_request.{txt|html} to add the new fields to the confirmation request, if it was necessary. This demo overrides them to include the title field in the mail.
• django_comments_xtd/comments_tree.html to show the new field when displaying the comments. If your project doesn’t allow nested comments you can use either this template or comments/list.html`.
• django_comments_xtd/reply.html to show the new field when displaying the comment the user is replying to.