A developer's journey

There was a post today in the Mach II forums on how to incorporate CFAkismet into Mach blog. I looked at Kismet and found it pretty neat and went on to obtain an API Key. And then it was getting the CFAkismet.cfc readjusted to akismetService.cfc and akismetListener.cfc. I used a Mach II Listener for incorporating Akismet into Mach Blog I followed the path of captcha that is used in comments. Kismet has not been incorporated with trackbacks but it can be with minimal effort and I will be doing that soon as well. The trackback submission event, the trackbackListener and the trackback form needs to be modified. Everything else stays the same. God I love frameworks !!!!

Here is the process

1. Modify the machii.xml.cfm file in your config folder. Add the following properties
<!-- CFKISMET-->
 <property name="useAkismet" value="true"/>  <!-- this can be changed to false if you dont want to use Akismet-->
 <property name="akismetAPIKey" value="YOUR API KEY HERE"/>

Add the following listeners

<listener name="akismetListener" type="machblog.org.machblog.listeners.akismetListener"/>

Modify the processCommentForm as follows

<event-handler event="processCommentForm" access="public">
<event-bean name="comment" type="machblog.org.machblog.beans.Comment"  fields="commentId,entryId,name,email,url,comment,isSubscribed,subscriberEmailSent" />
<notify listener="captchaListener" method="validateCaptcha"/>
<notify listener="akismetListener" method="isCommentSpam"/>
            <notify listener="commentListener" method="processCommentForm"/>
        </event-handler>

2. Modify the services.xml file in your config folder. Add the following lines

<!-- AKismet -->
 <bean id="akismetService" class="machblog.org.machblog.utils.akismet.akismetService">
 <property name="ApplicationName"><value>{appName}</value></property>
 <property name="BlogURL"><value>{blogURL}</value></property>  <property name="Key"><value>{akismetAPIKey}</value></property>
</bean>

3. Download two files akismetListener and akismetService from here

     Put the akismet folder in the zip file along with akismetService.cfc (modified from CFAkismet.cfc) to machblog/org/machblog/utils

     Put the akismetListner in with the rest of the listeners at machblog/org/machblog/listeners

4. Modify the main_en_US.properties file in machblog/i18n/ folder (the others can be modified as well but unfortunately english is the only language that I know). Add the following lines

akismetAPIFail=CFAkismet: You have not defined an API Key.  Make sure you've called the setKey() method with a valid key.  You can get an Akismet key at http://wordpress.com/api-keys/
akismetBlogFail=CFAkismet:  You have not defined your blog URL.  Make sure you've called the setBlogURL() method with your blog URL.
akismetAppFail=CFAkismet:  You have not set the application name and version calling Akismet.  Make sure you've called the setApplicationName() method with your app name and version, such as 'ThisApp/1.1.10'
akismetSpam=CFAkismet: This comment has been failed the spam test by AKismet

5. Modify the CommentsListener.cfc as follows (find the matching code and replace it - search for useCaptcha and you should find it)

<cfif getProperty("useCaptcha") AND arguments.event.isArgDefined("captchaMessage")>
<cfset success = false />
<cfset message = getProperty("resourceBundleService").getResourceBundle().getResource("captchafail") />
<cfelseif getProperty("useAkismet") AND arguments.event.isArgDefined("akismetMessage")>
<cfset success = false />
<cfset message = event.getArg("akismetMessage") />
<cfelse>
 <cfset getCommentService().createComment(comment) />
  <cfset message = getProperty("resourceBundleService").getResourceBundle().getResource("commentactionsuccessful") />

6. Modify the comments.cfm file in whatever skin you are using , preferably all so that nothing breaks when you change skins. What we are doing is adding a hidden form field to the form so that the required parameter "PermaLink" can be passed into AKismet. You can put this line anywhere between the the <form> and </form> tags

<input type="hidden" name="PermaLink" value="/index.cfm?#getProperty('eventParameter')#=showEntry&amp;entryId=#event.getArg('entryId')#">

Thanks to Peter Farrell and Matt Woodward, coz I followed the captcha code to incorporate Akismet into Mach Blog. Also thanks to Brandon Harper for the original CFAkismet.

Akismet

CFAkismet