Django’s comments app finally got a much needed refactor recently. The old version was quite frankly a mess and felt clunky to use, which is why I started developing django-simple-comments

The new django.contrib.comments was developed by Thejaswi Puthraya as a Google Summer of Code project. I took a quick glance through the code and it looks like a huge improvement over the old comments app. Even better is the fact that there is now documentation on the app. Overall, the comments app now feels like it has the quality of the other apps bundled into django.contrib.

I think there are still some fairly minor things missing, like cookies to remember user info, more feed options and email followups. I’ve build those features into my own comment apps, so I think this will actually be a good opportunity for me to contribute some code back to Django. At this point I’m not certain if I’ll start using django.contrib.comments immediately or just stick to my own comments app. They look quite similar, but I think for now I’ll stick to my own app for most projects, unless I have a good reason to use django.contrib.comments.

Regardless, big congrats to Thejaswi for getting that refactor out the door. Having cleaved that stale old comments app really makes Django feel more polished overall, just in time for the upcoming 1.0 release.