Upgrading from Django’s previous comment system¶

Prior versions of Django included an outdated, undocumented comment system. Users who reverse-engineered this framework will need to upgrade to use the new comment system; this guide explains how.

The main changes from the old system are:

• This new system is documented.

• It uses modern Django features like forms and modelforms.

• It has a single Comment model instead of separate FreeComment and Comment models.

• Comments have “email” and “URL” fields.

• No ratings, photos and karma. This should only effect World Online.

• The {% comment_form %} tag no longer exists. Instead, there’s now two functions: {% get_comment_form %}, which returns a form for posting a new comment, and {% render_comment_form %}, which renders said form using the comments/form.html template.

• The way comments are include in your URLconf have changed; you’ll need to replace:

  (r'^comments/', include('django.contrib.comments.urls.comments')),
  

  with:

  (r'^comments/', include('django.contrib.comments.urls')),
  

BEGIN;

INSERT INTO django_comments
    (content_type_id, object_pk, site_id, user_name, user_email, user_url,
    comment, submit_date, ip_address, is_public, is_removed)
SELECT
    content_type_id, object_id, site_id, person_name, '', '', comment,
    submit_date, ip_address, is_public, not approved
FROM comments_freecomment;

INSERT INTO django_comments
    (content_type_id, object_pk, site_id, user_id, user_name, user_email,
    user_url, comment, submit_date, ip_address, is_public, is_removed)
SELECT
    content_type_id, object_id, site_id, user_id, '', '', '', comment,
    submit_date, ip_address, is_public, is_removed
FROM comments_comment;

UPDATE django_comments SET user_name = (
    SELECT username FROM auth_user
    WHERE django_comments.user_id = auth_user.id
) WHERE django_comments.user_id is not NULL;
UPDATE django_comments SET user_email = (
    SELECT email FROM auth_user
    WHERE django_comments.user_id = auth_user.id
) WHERE django_comments.user_id is not NULL;

COMMIT;