WordPress’s default comment system isn’t exactly the greatest, and whilst you can improve the comment system manually, not everyone has the time or skill to do so. Thankfully, one of Automattic’s recent acquisitions, IntenseDebate can help.

Before we dive into installing IntenseDebate (which is really easy!), here is why you should use it, according to the IntenseDebate website:

So IntenseDebate is pretty much everything you could want from a comment system, so next we’re going to walk through the installation.

First thing is to go to www.intensedebate.com and signup. Next you’ll be asked to enter the URL of the site you want to install IntenseDebate on. Do so and click next. Assuming you’re running WordPress, you’ll be told you need to install the plugin:

Before you intsall the plugin, make sure you backup your database.

Once you’re backed up, follow the instructions above to step four. Once you’re at the tab, login with the account you just created, and then on the next screen click the big ‘Import Comments’ button. Sit back whilst your comments import themselves. When it is done, this screen will appear:

You’ll find a whole load of options to fiddle around with, so fiddle away, and then you’re done. Told you it way easy!

This was a guest post by Alex Denning, a WordPress power user, web design freelancer and Twitter fanatic (follow him here!). You can check out his site, Nometet.com here. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

If you talk to most bloggers, they will tell you that comments are possibly the most important and most rewarding part of maintaining a blog, because they allow for both feedback and direct interaction with the author of blog.    It looks like Automattic (the team behind WordPress) feels the same way, as they have taken a major step towards improving how comments work within WordPress with their recent acquisition of Intense Debate.

According to Matt:

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the product, Intense Debate supercharges the comment section of WordPress blogs and other sites with cool features like threading, reply by email, voting, reputation, and global profiles. There are a few companies tackling this space right now, but I was impressed with how much ID (Intense Debate) has been able to do with a small team, and happy to find that their common platform (PHP and MySQL) would make integration a lot easier.

Going forward, the plan is to keep Intense Debate available as a platform-agnostic independent service, much like Akismet. We’ll start to integrate its features into WordPress core, WordPress.com, and Gravatar as appropriate. For example, comment threading is going to be in WordPress 2.7, but reply by email is a lot easier to implement on a hosted service like WordPress.com. We’re also going to be able to lend our expertise in scaling to the ID team to make sure their users enjoy the same hassle-free speed and bulletproof availability as users of other Automattic services.

Long-term, I think that comments are the most crucial interaction point for blogs, and an area that deserves a lot of investment and innovation. Comments really haven’t changed in a decade, and it’s time to spice things up a little.

So, what does this mean for comments in WordPress?   It appears that Automattic is serious about improving WordPress comments and adding additional features, so I think the WordPress community has a lot to look forward to (think of the Gravatar or BuddyPress improvements).   It looks like we can also expect some of Intense Debates functionality to be built into the WordPress install at some point, hopefully as soon as WordPress 2.8 or 2.9!