Third-party Commenting Options require Creator plan or above?

Themes
1

I’m pretty far along setting up a hosted blog and would like comments that allow OAuth/social login. I.e., I don’t want to force users to jump through the hoop of creating an account for my tiny blog.

  1. I’ve set up the paid Starter plan.
  2. I checked out all the listed comment options in Integrations.
  3. I figured out that there’s no UI for adding the 3rd party comment js, and that one needs to download and edit the theme.
  4. I downloaded, edited it, and then when clicking the “upload theme” button…

I discover that this is a “custom” theme, and need to pay $25/month instead of $9/month. Is this pretty much the state of things? TBH, this was a frustrating experience because it took a long time to get to this dead end.

I’m thinking that self-hosted might be the best option for me. I don’t want a “custom” theme in the true sense — I want to keep the design as is. I simply want to use a 3rd party commenting solution.

2

Welcome to the community, @dogweather.

The features available for each Ghost(Pro) plan are listed here, and as you have discovered, the start plan only includes standard themes and integrations.

As an alternative to self-hosting, you could try alternative managed Ghost hosting. Whilst I now self-host, I have used Midnight although there are plenty of other options available.

1 Like
3

I would recommend getmidnight as a host.

1 Like
4

Before you throw in the towel, I wonder if you could accomplish this by using code injection. You can certainly load a .js file with code injection. Not sure, but it might be worth a try. Is there a specific commenting system you want to include?

1 Like
5

@Cathy_Sarisky That’s an interesting idea — think outside the box. I’m thinking about using the commenting system that requires a GitHub login, and saves the comments as GitHub issues.

And you’re right: there’s no reason, specifically, why a tag must be placed in post.hbs where you want the comments to go: It’s possible to do this entirely from Javascript. The code could even be configurable with a parameter to a function call: Tell it where to insert the comments. Maybe it could be done as a ‘wrapper’: First a JS function that inserts the tag that the actual commenting lib will look for.

And then these two pieces of JS can be injected into the bottom of the page, configured via the web ui. No custom theme needed.