Integrating DISQUS into a Windows 8 app

Question

Has anyone tried to integrate DISQUS into a Windows 8 store app? Or do we need to build around the DISQUS API?

We have an existing blog site that uses DISQUS and I'm currently building a Win8 app in XAML+C# that displays the same blog items (and have the comments functionality as well).

Answer 1

We haven't released this officially yet, but there's a public API wrapper that is compatible with Windows Store apps here: https://github.com/ryanvalentin/DisqusApiPortable

In general, there are a few things to think about when creating a commenting experience:

1. Authentication with the API - you need to have a server to receive the callback/request the access token. More information on that here: http://disqus.com/api/docs/auth/

2. Listing comments. The main limitation here is that there's no public API endpoint for showing threaded comments like you see in the embedded product. You would have to show a flat list of comments instead, sorted either oldest or newest.

3. Posting comments. This requires some care to make the experience pleasurable, including proper communication when a user encounters errors.

Additionally you can add comment voting, thread favoriting and almost anything else using the public API. This documentation covers general API usage that the wrapper enables: http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/1104798

Lastly, you might consider using a web view control to load the standard Disqus javascript embed. For that I'd follow these instructions: http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472096