Google is one big and mighty search engine, unmistakenly the leader in its field. Now that they have entered the Social Media market also, many of us are turning to Google Plus to build communities and share in "circles" for work and for pleasure. We anticipate that as Google introduces more social signals to its search engine algorithm, this inevitably will lead to an advantage if you are engaged with users on Google+.Not so long ago in April 2013, Google introduced to Blogger, its blogging platform, GOOGLE PLUS COMMENTS, so people can now comment on blogs using their Google+ profiles. According to Google's blog post:Using Google Plus Comments will allow you to: "View your blog and Google+ comments, all in one place. Now when you're browsing your blog's comment threads, you'll see activity from direct visitors, and from people talking about your content on Google+ ... This way you can engage with more of your readers, all in one place ... Help readers comment and connect with their circles"Not all of us use Blogger as a blogging platform, so thankfully we now have access to Google Plus Powered Comments via 3rd party plugins, but at this stage, no-one seems to know how Google plans to roll out the Google Plus commenting system to other platforms besides its own.Officially the integration of Google+ Comments is only available for Blogger sites, and Google isn't saying anything yet so their aren't many ways to control or customise the comments. Also the comments belong to Google Plus, not your website, so an option at this stage until we see what happens is to run with both the WordPress native commenting system, as well as Google Plus commenting. I guess this is kind of the best of both worlds.I've just finished adding Google+ comments to my site, I decided to add a custom function to my childtheme's functions.php file and a little bit of CSS to my childtheme's stylesheet file, rather than installing one of the WordPress plugins.The code is below if you'd like to try implementing Google+ comments on your own WordPress website. You may need to alter it to suit your website, and use a suitable hook to attach the function to. Different themes use different hooks but basically you want to look at adding the comments after the post and before the WordPress comments.// add google comments at end of post
function dtwd_google_comments() {
if (is_single()) { ?>
<div id="g-plus-comments"><h5>Try out the new Google+ comments</h5>
<div id="comments" style="width:578px;"></div>
<script>
gapi.comments.render('comments', {
href: window.location,
width: '578',
first_party_property: 'BLOGGER',
view_type: 'FILTERED_POSTMOD'
});
</script></div>
<?php }
}
add_action('ADD-YOUR-THEME-HOOK-HERE', 'dtwd_google_comments');
?>
Be sure to change 'ADD-YOUR-THEME-HOOK-HERE' to a suitable hook for your WordPress theme. For example 'genesis_before_comments' for Genesis framework, 'thesis_hook_after_post_box' for Thesis themes, etc.And here's the CSS that I'm using to style the above:#g-plus-comments {
height: 220px;
margin-bottom: 10px;
min-height:220px;
padding-bottom:10px;
}
#g-plus-comments h5 {
text-transform:uppercase;
font-size:14px;
font-weight:bold;
color:#A60000;
}
It will be interesting to see how this works, so please feel free to engage in the Google+ comments below and let me know if you implement on your website also so I can pop on over and check it out.*25th August 2013 UPDATE **After experimenting with the Google Plus Comments here on my blog, I have decided that the idea behind adding comments to your blog for more exposure on Google Plus hasn't really helped as much as I'd like. If Google decides to make the comments appear on the Google Plus wall/ feed of the business then it may be worth reconsidering in the future. But for the moment, running 2 commenting options is confusing, so I have opted to run with the WordPress commenting system. I have left this post with the Google Plus comments included, so feel free to try it out.
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