Someone has a Ghost.org blog, and with different author writing blog posts. They’ve installed a commenting system, Talkyard, and, when a reader posts a comment to article X, they want the blog post author of article X to get notified.
However, the commenting system doesn’t know about the authors over at the Ghost blog, or even that the blog is a Ghost blog.
What are good ways to “connect” a commenting system to Ghost, so that the correct Ghost blog author, gets notified, when a comment gets posted on his/her blog posts?
… Although the commenting system and Ghost use different databases, user accounts and servers, and don’t know about each other.
One thing that came to my mind, is webhooks: if Ghost sent a site.changed
webhook to Talkyard (the commenting system), and includes the URL to the new blog post, name of the author, the author’s unique id, and the author email address, then, Talkyard could automatically create (upsert) a user account for that Ghost blog author, in Talkyard’s database, and remember that that user is the author of the blog post. And automatically enable email notifications, for that author, for comments on that blog post. …
… However, there is no email address included in the webhook? Without an email address, this wouldn’t work (since then Talkyard doesn’t know where to send the notification emails).
(I found these docs: https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/content/#authors — no email address mentioned. Is that the right page? There’s also this docs page: https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/webhooks/#available-events
but it doesn’t describe how the web hook json looks. Is the webhook json described anywhere? :- ) )
Another idea is that Talkyard sends a webhook to the Ghost blog, when a comment gets posted, and includes the URL. Then maybe A) the Ghost blog, or B) a tiny custom HTTP server connected to the Ghost database, could look at the URL, lookup the author in the database, and send an email.
However, seems A) isn’t supported? Ghost doesn’t have API endpoints for doing that? (looking up an author for a blog post at a certain URL, and sending an email?)
B) could work, but requires the blog owner to write custom code, setup a new tiny server, … Is there no solution that doesn’t require coding?
A third approach is that the Ghost blog authors create accounts at the Talkyard blog comments site themselves, and manually subscribe to notifications to their own blog posts. However, being humans, sometimes they will forget to subscribe to comment replies (or so I think).
Thanks for any help & best regards,
Magnus (developing Talkyard b.t.w.)