A common method (if you're just using CMS, not community) - is to define a comment pagetype and have all comments for a page live as children of that page. This then allows you to easily hook up an -out-of-the-box approval workflow to run when a comment page type is saved.

If you're using EPiServer 6 then you'll find a number of posts about using the Dynamic DataStore / PageObjects API to store the comment information. However I would imagine that this will be harder to integrate with the out-of the box approval workflows.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm tending towards the second option even though there's no workflow because the thought of fouling up my content tree with thousands of comments is making me feel a little sick! Have played around with DDS before so it's only really the management facility that will need a little thought. I'm surprised there's no pre-packaged comments module already in existence.

Yep - your pagetree will grow somewhat if you're expecting a large number of comments.

Using the PageObject API access the dynamic data store will mean that the comments will belong to that page and be included in any mirroring / content export process which might be useful.

http://blog.bergdaniel.se/post/EPiServer-CMS-Page-Object-List-Helper.aspx

A comment module is included in the community EPiServer Relate package, but not in the standard CMS. I guess a full solution with an editor plugin would be a nice open source project for EPiCode etc.

Now that is exactly what i'm looking for. Thanks for the link.

I agree that it would be good for epicode. There are quite few situations where certain bits of the Community product would be useful in projects but not enough to warrant buying the full product license.

Hello Joel, another quick/easy option might be http://disqus.com/. Its 3rd party and therefore not built into the CMS but you get some really great functionality, really easily. You could build some gadgets on top of the API if you wanted to give your editors some control though it does already contain spam filtering as part of the standard offering.

I like having the comments stored one the page itself. Create a comments property and store the comments in a xml format. This will support both searching and mirroring/copy/past out of the box from EPiServer. You mention a workflow to avoid spam. This require alot of the editors, and I am not so sure that this is nessecary. You could use recaptcha to avoid spam instead. If you use my suggestion the editors could also easly delete a comment from the page property if they want to...