Enable Comments, Ratings, and Social Bookmarking

Comments allow end users to comment on articles appearing on your website.  Depending on the settings you choose, you can open or restrict commenting to logged in or anonymous users, moderate comments or allow them to post directly to the site, and allow commenting on all articles or only those in a specific section and category.

Enable Comments, Ratings, and Social Bookmarks

The first step for allowing comments on articles is to enable this feature across the site by doing the following:

1. Go to Components > Comments
2. Click Options in the upper right
3. In the popup window under System Setup Options on the System tab, for Enable Comments, select Yes to enable or No to disable
4. For Enable Guest Comments, select Yes or No to determine whether end users who have not logged in to your site should be able to comment on content
5. For Enable Comment Feeds, select Yes or No to display a link to an RSS feed for comments on an article
6. For Enable Rating, select Yes or No to show or hide the star rating functionality
7. For Enable Social Bookmarks, select Yes or No to show or hide links for end users to share a given page on their preferred social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or delicious.
8. Click Save

Enable Comments, Ratings, and Social Bookmarking for types of content

A number of parameters for the Commenting functionality are available to you as an administrator.  To set parameters:

1. Go to Extensions > Plugin Manager
2. Find Content - Comments in the list, or type comments into the search box and click the Go button. This plugin must be enabled, as discussed above, in order to display comments in regular Joomla articles.
3. Click the title of this plugin to edit it.
4. In the right column under Plugin Parameters for Show for Uncategorized, select Yes or No depending on whether you would like commenting available on content in the Uncategorized section and category
5. For Show for Categories, select one or more articles sections and categories for comments to be enabled. Hold down the ctrl (or command key) and click to select multiple categories.
6. For Show for Frontpage, select select Yes or No to show comments for articles in a frontpage view that are in section and categories where comments are enabled. This applies to your site only if it uses the Frontpage menu item to show content on your home page.  If you are not sure if this is the case, go to Menus > Main Menu.  If Home menu item lists Articles > Front Page under the Type column, this applies to your site.  If not, it does not.
7. For Show for Sections, select Yes or No to show comments for articles in a section view that are in categories where comments are enabled
8. For Show for Categories, select Yes or No to show comments for articles in a category view that are in categories where comments are enabled
9. For Show Sharing, select Yes or No to globally enable or disable sharing links for articles.
10. For Show Ratings, select Yes or No to globally enable or disable ratings for articles
11. For Show Comments, select Yes or No to globally enable or disable comments for articles

Advanced Parameters:

• In the right column under Advanced Parameters, for Sharing Placement, select Before the Body Text or After the Body Text to adjust the placement of the social bookmarking links
• In the right column under Advanced Parameters, for Ratings Placement, select Before the Body Text or After the Body Text to adjust the placement of the ratings
• In the right column under Advanced Parameters, for Comments Placement, select Before the Body Text or After the Body Text to adjust the placement of the comments
• Click Save in the upper right