Such was my determination to get the Custom Comments Web Part installed today that I ended up pestering no fewer than three colleagues in order to achieve a successful install. The third time charm required the assistance of our Admin, Brett, who made short work of successfully installing the Web Part to my team's test area. It seems that there's a permissions issue on the server in question which was the reason the rest of us met with failure in our attempts, and that (provided proper permissions are in place) installing the Web Part really is as simple as clicking the install file and providing the URL of the site on which it should be installed.
Sure enough, once Brett told me the install was complete, there it was in the Web Parts gallery:
Adding the Web Part to my blog page and expecting it to magically replace the out-of-the-box Comments Web Part, however, was where things (again) got complicated. Oh, I was able to add the Custom Comments Web Part to the page with no trouble:
But it just got added as an additional Comments Web Part on the page, albeit one with the Post Anonymously checkbox option present (and enabled by default). Attempting to add a comment by using this Web Part, however, generated the cryptic error message: Blog ID is missing. Initially thinking that I'd need to make a change in the Custom Settings of the Web Part's tool pane, I took a look there but didn't see anything that looked like a promising avenue:
(Note: In the Blog Replacement Script available via the Editor button in the image above, you may also manually edit the JavaScript to replace the word "Anonymous" with whatever you prefer as the identifier of the commenter. Instructions appear in the supporting documentation available at CodePlex.)
My next thought was that maybe the URL of the blog itself would be required in order to associate the new Custom Comments Web Part with the blog, so I pasted that URL into the (previously empty) title field in the Advanced settings of the Web Part's tool pane. Doing so merely resulted in the same cryptic error message though.
It was at this point that I figured, hey, I can't be the first person this has ever happened to, so I hustled back to Lawrence Liu's blog announcing the Custom Comments Web Part and cruised through the comments. Sure enough, there was someone reporting the same error message ... and hot on the heels of that comment was someone else providing the solution. You've just got to love the wisdom of crowds, don't you?
What I learned was that there are two key bits of information (missing from the provided documentation, I might add ... yes, I also read the "owner's manual" at some point in my search for a solution), and the first of them is that you can't add the Custom Comments Web Part to the main blog page, but you must add it to the page of an individual blog post. The second bit of useful information is that the Custom Comment Web Part doesn't automatically overwrite the existing out-of-the-box Comments Web Part, but you must manually delete the out-of-the-box instance and manually replace it by dragging and dropping the Custom Comments Web Part (while in Edit Mode) into the same real estate. Once complete, you should be good to go.
I had posted a test comment using the out-of-the-box Comment Web Part prior to doing the above, and after completing the Web Part Replacement surgery, I added a new test comment using the Custom Comment Web Part. I mention that by way of explaining why you see my name present on the first test comment in the image below, and (yay!) Anonymous as the commenter in the case of the second test comment:
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Posted
Jun 29 2009, 05:15 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.