Split contrib.comments CommentForm class to allow easier customization

I am a +1 on this feature because people might not want to have spam protection which might be redundant if they use an external spam detection facility.

I don't like the way the patch has been written because it gives a feeling to the user that a custom form should be inherited from BaseCommentForm?. So i have made another patch.

But I would like to hear what a developer has to say about this feature.

git-patch against the latest checkout

Using 9958.diff solves a different problem than my original patch comments.diff. With the approach in 9958.diff neither inheriting from BaseCommentForm nor inheriting from CommentForm allows for easy customization of the fields the form uses.

Please consider that not every projects needs a comment form with the fields "name", "email", "url" and "comment". Sometimes "name" and "comment" may be enough and 9958.diff gives no form-class from which I can inherit to cleanly build my own comment form with less fields than the original CommentForm. I feel like overriding __init__() and using del to delete form-fields is not a clean solution.

Using an approach like in comments.diff one can either subclass BaseCommentForm to customize the fields the form has and use all the existing Spam-protection logic or could use a completly other form (inheriting form forms.Form) to circumvent the Spam-protection as thejaswi_puthraya pointed out and the ability to customize the fields.

Replying to arne:

Using 9958.diff solves a different problem than my original patch comments.diff. With the approach in 9958.diff neither inheriting from BaseCommentForm nor inheriting from CommentForm allows for easy customization of the fields the form uses. Please consider that not every projects needs a comment form with the fields "name", "email", "url" and "comment". Sometimes "name" and "comment" may be enough and 9958.diff gives no form-class from which I can inherit to cleanly build my own comment form with less fields than the original CommentForm. I feel like overriding __init__() and using del to delete form-fields is not a clean solution.

Thank you for providing an insight into your problem.

Using an approach like in comments.diff one can either subclass BaseCommentForm to customize the fields the form has and use all the existing Spam-protection logic or could use a completly other form (inheriting form forms.Form) to circumvent the Spam-protection as thejaswi_puthraya pointed out and the ability to customize the fields.

I have seen a lot of requests in IRC from people who felt that the current honeypot mechanism provided by the comments was insufficient and/or was redundant with their home-grown/third-party solution. Hence I segregated the two forms to remove that redundancy.

Here are my observations regarding your patch: * I would prefer your patch provided it does not have the honeypot in the BaseCommentForm? because it forces the spam protection on users who don't require one. * It still does not remove the pain of say having a form that removes the email field and I am sure no other patch can remove that pain. It is best to draw a line somewhere and let the user take a small pain (one-time effort) to write a custom form.

My personal opinion is that spam protection should be optional. Let me come up with another patch that tackles mixes both your problem and mine.

Let's leave it to the devels and see what is the best for such a scenario.

Ok here is what is basically done. First there is a BaseCommentForm? that holds the most vital fields of the form ie content_type, object_pk, timestamp and security hash. Then a second form called MetaCommentForm? (that is a subclass of BaseCommentForm?)(please change the name of MetaCommentForm? if it sounds confusing) that holds the name, email, url etc fields. Then a third form called CommentForm? (a subclass of MetaCommentForm?) that holds the honeypot.

a patch that hopefully solves arne's and my problem

a patch that hopefully solves arne's and my problem

Is a fairly simple and backwards-compatible fix that could make into 1.1beta

(In [10110]) Fixed #9958: split the CommentForm into a set of smaller forms. This for better encapsulation, but also so that it's easier for subclasses to get at the pieces they might need. Thanks to Thejaswi Puthraya.