How to insert comments into Mambo, using Haloscan

Note: I wanted to put this on my blog but Blogger didn't allow me to insert some tags (like HEAD and JS code), so I put it here in a standalone page.

HaloScan is a nice comment system for blogs and websites. The problem for me was that it doesn't support Mambo the same way it support other blog systems. You need to use the manual code insert option in Haloscan to put Haloscan into Mambo. Here is the hack that worked for me, but I can't assure that will work for you :)

You have to edit 2 files, the main template and the content.html.php (look in the directory components/com_content/). On the main template, look for the HEAD tags and insert this code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.haloscan.com/load/YOUR_ID_HERE"> </script>

Then you have to edit the content.html.php file. Look for this string:

<?php echo _LAST_UPDATED; ?> ( <?php echo $mod_date; ?> )

It should be around line 790, but YMMV :). And after that line insert the following text:

<?php $titulo = str_replace(" ", "", $row->title); 
$letras = array("á","é","í","ó","ú",";",",","=","?");
$titulolisto = str_replace($letras, "", $titulo);?>
<a href="javascript:HaloScan('<?php echo $titulolisto; ?>');" target="_self"><script type="text/javascript">postCount('<?php echo $titulolisto; ?>');</script></a> | <a href="javascript:HaloScanTB('<?php echo $titulolisto; ?>');" target="_self"><script type="text/javascript">postCountTB('<?php echo $titulolisto; ?>'); </script></a>

I think it is pretty self-explained, but anyway here is a line by line explanation:

<?php $titulo = str_replace(" ", "", $row->title);

I put in $titulo the title of the post without spaces.


$letras = array("á","é","í","ó","ú",";",",","=","?");

Here I put the characters that are likely to be on the post title that I want to filter out.

$titulolisto = str_replace($letras, "", $titulo);?>

I remove those chars I don't want to be in the name of the variable that my comments are linked to.
The rest is the HTML code provided by Haloscan, but instead of Name, you replace it with:

<?php echo $titulolisto; ?>

This worked for me in this site: asalup.org