November 14, 2008

It looks like IntenseDebate is open for business again. They went back into private beta after being acquired by Automattic, no doubt to prepare properly for the flood of WordPress users, but now they are back and you can create an account now.

IntenseDebate is a plugin replacement for a blog’s commenting system. It handles the comments, threading, reputation points of commenters and a lot more. It also now has much better WordPress integration (similar to Disqus) so your comments will stay your own.

I think the timing of this is really interesting because IntenseDebate offers a really quite and simple way out for people upgrading to WordPress 2.7 and finding that their theme doesn’t support the new comment features, or that they are having difficulty converting to them.

I wrote a post a few weeks back: Why you should try Disqus before 2.7, and I think the same applies to IntenseDebate. It may well be the best way to upgrade the comments functions even though 2.7 has the natively.

Update: I have been told on twitter that there is a problem with the importer only importing one comment per post, per commenter. Whether that is setup specific or not I can’t say. The lesson here is to make sure you back up to make sure you can undo anything later.

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