By nemot on

Hi,

I've been using Drupal to implement some websites and am quite happy with all the features and modules it offers. One thing I am missing however for my latest website is an anonymous guestbook (where visitors can easily leave a message).

Currently I see three options:

- Use the Guestbook module (but this one does not allow to include the email address or URL of the submitter unless you customise, which I'd like to avoid)
- Use Flexinode and create a specific content item (but in this case adding a guestbook entry uses the standard add content page which I definitely don't want my guests to get because to complex)
- Implement my own module (but I'd rather reuse something existing and spend my time on getting my Gallery integration working properly...)

I imagine that I'm not the only one needing this functionality so I'd like to get some views on what would be the best approach. I mainly fancy the Flexinode one currently but then I'd really need to be able to customise the add content page (so that users just have to enter the flexinode specific items and submit).

Any help is appreciated,

Thanks,

Peter.

Comments

eveltman’s picture

eveltman commented

You can create a forum topic, a page or a story, name it "Guest book" and allow users to comment on it.

Give anonymous users permission to post comments. If you don't enable "post comments without approval", then you have to approve first. That's a good thing, because without the approval mechanism, your guestbook may soon be flooded with spam comments.

Ayman’s picture

Ayman commented

Why not simply let users comment to a specific node? Create a page node called guestbook or something similar, link to it, and let users post messages in it by commenting.

What guestbook features does this approach miss?

Edit: beaten :p

--
Ayman Hourieh
http://aymanh.com/

nemot’s picture

nemot commented

Indeed, I was so much looking for a guestbook module that I forgot that the basic commenting would work - thanks for reminding me! The comment functionality actually fulfills all my requirements so I'll use this approach, I only have one issue left: I want to adapt the labels used in the screens to be different than the one for 'real' comments.

On the content page itself I can probably do this (have a different name for the 'Add Comment' link) by using flexinode (define a content type for the guestbook text, and then create a seperate template for this specific node type). However when adding the actual comment (which I prefer to have on a different screen) I don't know how to achieve this. Any ideas?

jtravs’s picture

jtravs commented

Hello, did you find a solution to this, as I am also interested.
John

nemot’s picture

nemot commented

I was finally able to find a solution. I used the approach suggested in the thread, meaning I created a seperate flexinode type which is only used to show the guestbook text ("Please leave a message here blablabla..."). Using the normal flexinode theming I managed to get the layout of this page exactly as I wanted.

Then I enabled comments for anonymous users for this specific type and used that as the guestbook functionality. The only issue was that I found the standard comment editing form (now used to enter a guestbook entry) too complicated for my audience. I tried to solve this in the templates but I don't think that is possible, so in the end I had to actually modify the comment.module file, where I adapted the comment_form() function. In there I used the $edit['nid'] variable to determine whether the comment was for a guestbook entry (as these have a specific node ID) and then disabled some features if this was the case.

It may not be the cleanest option (if anyone knows how to do this without touching comment.module please let me know!) but it did what I needed.

hba’s picture

hba commented

Guestbook.module was just updated to 4.7. It supports an anonymous guestbook now.

http://drupal.org/project/guestbook