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Multiple Websites

A single Talkyard site can show comments for many blogs and websites.

A commenter will have the same user account and username across all those blogs and websites. And, if you use your Talkyard site as a discussion forum too — e.g. https://forum.example.com — they'd have the same username there.

Let's say you have a blog at blog.example.com, another blog at blog.sub.example.com, and a documentation website at docs.example.com, and you want people to post comments and ask questions about your blog posts and docs.

To make this work, then, as admin for your Talkyard site:

  1. Go to Settings | Features, here: http:// your talkyard site /-/admin/settings/features,

    1. Tick Enable API. This lets you assign reference IDs to categories (explained below).

    2. Tick Enable discussion forum. (Note: cannot be undone, but doesn't matter, just makes category related buttons visible in the user interface if accessing your Talkyard site directly. Doesn't affect blog comments pages.) — This lets you create categories, so you can organize comments from different websites into separate categories.

    3. If you want, de-select tags, chat, direct messages. You only need API and categories.

    4. Click Save.

  2. Create categories. Click Back from Admin Area at the top, then click View categories below the site title. Click Create Category to the right. In our example, we'd create these: "Blog Comments", "Sub Blog comments", and "Docs Comments".

    Also click External ID at the bottom of each Create Category dialog, and type a reference id, so you can reference these categories from your websites. In our example, we could pick IDs blog_comments, sub_blog_comments and docs_comments. (Anything that works for you.)

  3. Go to Settings | Embedded Comments, here: /-/admin/settings/embedded-comments and, in Allow embedding from, type the domains where you'll embed Talkyard comments. In our examlpe, that'd be:

    https://blog.example.com
    https://blog.sub.example.com
    https://docs.example.com

  4. For each blog or website where you want to add embedded comments, select the blogging platform you use, in the Which blog do you use? Or static site generator? section. These buttons don't do anything except for showing different instructions. It's fine to use different blogging platforms, for different blogs and websites of yours.

    When you add the embedding code snippets, also add a data-category attribute, and set it to rid:REFERENCE_ID, where the REFERENCE_ID is one of the IDs you specified above (blog_comments, sub_blog_comments and docs_comments in our example). — This tells Talkyard to place comments from [the website you're configuring] in the category with reference ID REFERENCE_ID.

    Here's how it can look:

    <div class="talkyard-comments"
      data-category="rid:sub_blog_comments"
      data-discussion-id="{{comment_id}}">

    (That's with Ghost as blogging platform — Ghost wants the discussion ID specified as {{comment_id}}, the last line above. But the data-category=... is the same, regardless of what platform you use.)

  5. Redeploy your blogs and websites to activate the blog comments HTML.

That should be it. Post a test comment on each website and see what happens.