Vanilla Forums as a replacement for WordPress comments?

Question

I really like the way Vanilla Forums is integrating with WordPress however I am wondering if it is possible to take it one step further?

What i'd like to be able to do is to replace WordPress comments with a Vanilla Forum thread. That way, the conversation can continue and work more in the fashion of a forum thread, as opposed to a point in time comment.

Can this be done?

Answer 1

The downside of using a forum system for comments, is that:

1. the user probably has to register with the site to post a comment
2. the user may not have single sign on ability through Vanilla
3. you won't be storing your comments in a system that can export them and import them into another commenting engine, like Intense Debate or Disqus.
4. you're giving up the ability to use Facebook Comments--that's if that's important to you.
5. you lose all the moderation settings under Discussion, and you won't be able to see your comments in the WordPress admin against posts in the post editor, unless somehow you figure out how to program that in. It's important, so you can approve/deny or spam comments. Plus, you may not get the benefits of Akismet.

Answer 2

Of course it's possible pretty much everything is possible. It just might take some work. Being that they are both php apps you should be able to replace your normal comment block in your WordPress theme with a Vanilla forum thread. You would want to run a Vanilla query that creates a new thread for each post (see docs) then just get the tread by title.

Sorry I couldn't give you a step by step how to but this should at least get you started.

Answer 3

Vanilla recently released an update to their WordPress plugin that enables the comments to be replaced with a Vanilla thread discussion. See here:

http://vanillaforums.com/blog/news/introducing-vanilla-comments/