INTRODUCTION

Comecon is a commenting system for your (static) blog. It is written in vanilla PHP without any frameworks and with almost no JavaScript. PHP is employed to both save and display comments.

Comecon is not a WordPress-plugin nor any other kind of plugin. It is a collection of PHP-files that you must set up and upload to your webpage server following the instructions in DEPLOYMENT.

Furthermore, Comecon does not use any database. There is no MySQL and the comments are written to and read from flat files (TXT with custom delimiter <|>).

Comecon has two core limitations you should be aware of from the outset:

• Since there is no database, Comecon might not work correctly if there are multiple comment submissions at once. Thus, Comecon is probably not the best choice if your blog has a lot of (commenting) traffic. However, it works very quickly if comments are reasonably sparse. I guess the problems won't start if there is less than one comment per ten seconds.
• Comecon assumes you won't be blogging more than once per day, and it requires that all blog posts have the following URL: https://myblog.com/YYYY/MM/DD/post-title/index.php The scripts rely heavily on the YYYY/MM/DD/post-title identifiers to manage the comment files.

FEATURES

Comecon allows blog readers to:

• add and read comments under blog posts (obviously);
• attach links under their nicknames;
• receive email notifications about new comments (or about new blog posts, for that matter);
• edit or delete their comments within predefined time after submitting;
• register their nicknames and feature their comments.

Furthermore, Comecon has:

• a simple captcha;
• an internal search engine for the blog posts and the comments.

Bonus features:

• random post selection;
• random quote generator.

DEPLOYMENT

These are instructions for deploying the core part of Comecon. For information about search engine, random post selection and random quote generator, see DETAILS.

1. Copy all PHP-files from src to your server into https://myblog.com/assets or https://myblog.com/sub/path/assets or similar. The final subdirectory must be called assets.
2. Copy all PHP-files from private to a non-public directory on your server. This directory could be e.g. /home/johndoe/data. You can set the name of the directory through site.dir_with_data, see below.
3. Fill out settings.php and vip.php (that you have just copied from private).
4. Create an empty file called all_comments.txt in your assets subdirectory. This file could have another name; change $allCommentsFile in settings.php accordingly.
5. In every blog post you must include form-submit_comment.html and add_comments.php (the latter will be displaying comments).
6. Finally, unpack PHP Mailer to a directory on your server. $phpMailerDir from settings.php must be pointing to that directory. Notice that you only need src of PHP Mailer. Take a look at the first lines of email_sending.php to understand exactly what you need.

Comecon is meant to be used with a static site generator (SSG), specifically Jekyll. However, it is NOT required that you use Jekyll, nor any other SSG for that matter.

If you do use Jekyll:

Most of the PHP-scripts are meant to be parsed by Jekyll. This is why they are preluded with layout: null headers. Within these scripts you will namely find Jekyll tags {{ site.url }} and {{ site.dir_with_data }}. These must be defined in the Jekyll config file. site.url is obviously your webpage, e.g. https://myblog.com. site.dir_with_data is the server directory where you keep settings.php and vip.php, e.g. /home/johndoe/data.

If you do not use Jekyll:

In all PHP-scripts:

• Remove layout: null headers together with the delimiting ---.
• Replace {{ site.url }} with your blog URL, e.g. https://myblog.com`.
• Replace {{ site.dir_with_data }} with the server directory where you keep the vip.phpandsettings.php, e.g. /home/johndoe/data`.