Disqus Migration to Drupal

The disqus module allows the usage of drupal with the disqus commenting system.
Since I recently migrated, I’d love to be able to:
a) keep all of my links the same
and
b) have all the old comments show up on the new site.
Problem a) can be solved by simply using the pathauto module and some minor tweaking wherever needed.
Problem b) needed some hacking for me.

I always used the alias (blog.marc-seeger.de/year/month/day/slug) as an identifier on disqus. The durpal module, by default, uses the drupal node ID (blog.marc-seeger.de/node/123) as the identifier.
It’s easy enough to make some small changes though. All of this is in the disqus.module file. Here is the original passage that sets the disqus URL:

1
2
3
4
5

        // Build the absolute URL without the alias for the disqus_url flag.
        $node->disqus['url'] = url("node/$node->nid", array(
          'alias' => TRUE,
          'absolute' => TRUE,
        ));

Just change the ‘alias’ parameter to false to get your aliased path as the disqus URL:

1

          'alias' => FALSE,

This tells the url() function to NOT assume that the alias is already resolved.
The API for the url function describes it as “Whether the given path is a URL alias already.” The second thing you have to change is the disqus identifier. Also in the disqus.module search for this:

1
2

    // Provide the identifier.
        $node->disqus['identifier'] = 'node/' . $node->nid;

and replace it by:

1
2
3
4
5

        // Provide the identifier.  
        $node->disqus['identifier'] = url("node/$node->nid", array(
          'alias' => FALSE,
          'absolute' => TRUE,
        ));

Worked for me :)