I wanted a simple comment system for the site where guests could add comments on articles.  After taking a look at the Joomla.org Extensions library I decided to give AKOcomment a try.

You can see an example of what it looks like "in action" below.  It's fairly easy to use, and there are different templates available to customize the look of the comments themselves.  The default templates don't give me the exact appearance I'm looking for, but I haven't looked for other templates yet or tried tweaking the default templates.

I have found a couple of minor "glitches" (not really bugs, just odd things I found),  and I also had to do some tweaking in the php code to get it to look and behave the way I wanted. Other than that though, installation was easy, and the comments work smoothly.

I like the fact that you can add comments to individual articles with the mambot, rather than whole sections or categories!  To do this, just add "{mos comment}" (withouth the space) to the end of your article.  I tried another commenting system ("Joomla comment", I believe) and was not able to do this.

"Glitches": 

1) AKOcomment removed all menues, modules, etc. on the page after submitting a comment.

• basicly I would send a comment and I would get a "Comment saved to content item" message at the top of the page, followed by the article and comments, with nothing else at all visible (no headers, menues or modules in any of the regular Joomla positions for my site), as if they had disappeared.
  

What caused it:

• I had chosen "Open in new window" for the   Comment Window Option ("General" tab of Edit Settings panel).  To fix it, I just switched to "Open in same window"
  
• As far as I can tell this is the only thing that this option does (it doesn't hide the comment form, to be opened in a new window as I hoped it would).  It may work better with some templates if that's what you want.

2) AKOcomment template stlyes are applied to the whole page.

• I'm still working on this one.  I noticed my paragraphes were all indented on articles with comments when I used the "bubble" and "round" templates.  I'm not really sure why yet.  I'll keep you posted!
  

Editing the appearance: 

1) Removing the comment "rules" (bulleted list on the comment form)

If you don't want that bulleted list to appear, here's one way you can get rid of it:

1. Go to your com_akocomment/languages folder and open "English.php" (or whichever language your site uses).  You can use Wordpad or another text editor to open/edit the file.
2. Find "AKOCOMMENT_WRITEPOLICY" and change the whole line to the following:  DEFINE("_AKOCOMMENT_WRITEPOLICY","");
   
3. Save the file and upload it to your server to replace the original "English.php" file.  Voila! No more bulleted list!

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