Erik Akers

About a year ago I first found about about IntenseDe­bate. For those that don’t know Intense Debate is com­ment plug for most blog­ging plat­forms that adds extra func­tion­al­ity to blogs com­ment sys­tems. When I first heard about it the the biggest fea­ture was thread reply com­ments, since Word­Press at that time didn’t offer threaded com­ment replies (now it does).

Auto­matic the com­pany be hide Word­Press had recent pur­chased Intense Debate and it looked like it would inte­grate into a Word­Press instal­la­tion quickly and eas­ily. Again this was last fall, so after look­ing around and I decide I was going to install it on the site to replace my com­ment sys­tem at the time.

Well after about two weeks of using it I went back to the old com­ment­ing sys­tem because the plu­gin just wasn’t work­ing like it claimed it would be. Just gen­eral buggy reac­tions, the com­ment mod­er­a­tion from the Word­Press admin panel didn’t work for me at all, some of my com­ments were com­pletely lost dur­ing the IntenseDe­bate import and I couldn’t get them to show up for any­thing. Auto­matic and IntenseDe­bate would respond to com­ments that the inte­gra­tion inside of the Word­Press admin panel would get bet­ter but at the time it just wasn’t worth the trouble.

How­ever about a month ago I came across IntenseDe­bate again and from the looks of it, they had really added a bunch of fea­tures to the plug-in. They had clearly address the Word­Press admin panel inter­face and a few other really buggy things that didn’t work the first time I installed it.

I decided to install it on a devel­op­ment site and see how it worked. To my sur­prise it pretty much worked flaw­lessly, com­ment mod­er­a­tion was quick and snappy. You could reply to a reader’s com­ment from inside of the Word­Press admin panel and true to they’re words all of the inte­gra­tion issues with the admin panel we a thing of the past. And they added one big fea­ture, to me at least, Face­book Con­nect and Twit­ter account inte­gra­tion. Which basi­cally means a Face­book or Twit­ter using can use their log-in infor­ma­tion for those ser­vices on this site and it would post or tweet their activ­ity to their accounts.

I thought this was big because really this whole social mar­ket craze is about get­ting peo­ple to con­nect with you and their friends in their social net­work. So being able to offer some­one the option of using their Face­book log in to leave a com­ment and then it posts to their wall that they left a com­ment on this site is a huge plus. It puts con­tent in front of a whole new set of eyes that may not have ever known about it and that is the very basic idea be hide social marketing.

There are and have been other ways to use Face­book Con­nect for read­ers to com­ment using their Face­book log in, for Word­Press, I’ve just about tried them all and I was always unhappy with the results. This being my per­sonal site, I make no income from it and I don’t want it mucked up with ads so I want to spend as lit­tle time as I need to on fix­ing prob­lems and issues that come up so I can focus on cre­at­ing con­tent. The other Face­book Con­nect options out I found I spent much more time then I wanted try­ing to get Face­book Con­nect to work cor­rectly. And again if I’m work­ing on a client’s site that wants a tight inte­gra­tion with Face­book I’m going to spend on the time on it, but here on this site isn’t the place for that.

Enter IntenseD­abate, it gives that func­tion­al­ity with out the fuss of always mak­ing sure the Face­book login works cor­rectly because now the IntenseDe­bate devel­op­ers those issues. The only that has to be done as a web­mas­ter is about 5 min­utes of set through Face­book when IntenseD­abate is first acti­vated and that’s it.

I have a per­sonal strug­gle with design­ing com­ment sec­tion for this site. Mainly because I never bud­get my time well enough or just plan for­get about putting any thought into the com­ment sec­tion. It’s again because I’m work­ing on a site that isn’t pay­ing me any­thing, rightly or wrongly I want to get it redesigned and fin­ished up quickly. I’ve found that IntenseDe­bate is great for this, it takes the con­cern about spend­ing a lot of time on design and com­ment­ing sys­tem and lets me get any redesign done faster and easier.

As you may be able to tell I’ve move this site and a cou­ple other sites I run over to the IntenseD­abate sys­tem and I really couldn’t be hap­pier with how it’s pre­formed. Take a look at IntenseDe­bate for any Word­Press Projects you may have, with it’s built in social net­work­ing func­tion­al­ity it’s a no-brianer for get­ting a quick Face­book Con­nect sys­tem setup on any blog­ging platform.