Django Comments: Want to remove user URL, not expand the model. How to?

Question

I'm totally understanding the documentation on expanding the Comments app in Django, and really would like to stick with the automatic functionality but...

In the current app, I have absolutely no use for an "URL" to be submitted along with a comment.

Being minimally invasive of the default setup, how can I prevent this field from showing up with the comment form?

Using Django 1, or Trunk, and as many generic/built-ins as possible (generic views, default comments set up, etc. I have only a single generic view wrapper so far).

Answer 1

I can't comment onto SmileyChris' post for some reason, so I am going to post it here. But, I ran into errors using just SmileyChris' response. You also have to overwrite the get_comment_create_data function because CommentForm is going to look for those Post keys that you removed. So here's my code after I removed three fields.

class SlimCommentForm(CommentForm):
"""
A comment form which matches the default djanago.contrib.comments one, but with 3 removed fields
"""
def get_comment_create_data(self):
    # Use the data of the superclass, and remove extra fields
    return dict(
        content_type = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(self.target_object),
        object_pk    = force_unicode(self.target_object._get_pk_val()),
        comment      = self.cleaned_data["comment"],
        submit_date  = datetime.datetime.now(),
        site_id      = settings.SITE_ID,
        is_public    = True,
        is_removed   = False,
    )


SlimCommentForm.base_fields.pop('url')
SlimCommentForm.base_fields.pop('email')
SlimCommentForm.base_fields.pop('name')

This is the function that you are overwriting

def get_comment_create_data(self):
    """
    Returns the dict of data to be used to create a comment. Subclasses in
    custom comment apps that override get_comment_model can override this
    method to add extra fields onto a custom comment model.
    """
    return dict(
        content_type = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(self.target_object),
        object_pk    = force_unicode(self.target_object._get_pk_val()),
        user_name    = self.cleaned_data["name"],
        user_email   = self.cleaned_data["email"],
        user_url     = self.cleaned_data["url"],
        comment      = self.cleaned_data["comment"],
        submit_date  = datetime.datetime.now(),
        site_id      = settings.SITE_ID,
        is_public    = True,
        is_removed   = False,
    )

Answer 2

This is well documented under customizing the comments framework.

All your app will use is get_form, returning a subclass of the CommentForm with the url field popped. Something like:

class NoURLCommentForm(CommentForm):
    """
    A comment form which matches the default djanago.contrib.comments one, but
    doesn't have a URL field.

    """
NoURLCommentForm.base_fields.pop('url')

Answer 3

My quick and dirty solution: I made the the 'email' and 'url' fields hidden fields, with an arbitrary value to get rid of 'this field is required' errors.

It's not elegant, but it's quick and I didn't have to subclass CommentForm. All the work of adding comments was done in the template, which is nice. It looks like this (warning: not tested, since it's a simplified version of my actual code):

{% get_comment_form for entry as form %}

<form action="{% comment_form_target %}" method="post"> {% csrf_token %}

{% for field in form %}

    {% if field.name != 'email' and field.name != 'url' %}
        <p> {{field.label}} {{field}} </p>
    {% endif %}

{% endfor %}

    <input type="hidden" name="email" value="[email protected]" />
    <input type="hidden" name="url" value="http://www.foofoo.com" />

    <input type="hidden" name="next" value='{{BASE_URL}}thanks_for_your_comment/' />
    <input type="submit" name="post" class="submit-post" value="Post">
</form>