Viafoura and Pugpig Bolt
Written by Hughie Molloy
Updated at October 1st, 2024
Table of Contents
What is Viafoura
Viafoura is a digital platform that helps with increasing user engagement within your content via the use of interactive tools such as comments on articles. In order to implement this, we assume you already have the comments integrated and working on your live website. If a user comments on an article on your app, those comments are shared with the website.
Development and Configuration Required
Some work will need to be done on your side to enable this feature.
What Viafoura features do we support?
Currently we integrate with Viafoura using the javascript API, though we are looking to implement the app SDK soon.
Comments
With the javascript SDK we support comments, known as conversations on the Viafoura website.
We are able to support users automatically signing in via the account they're signed in to the app with and you can have the same comments on articles in the app as you do on your website.
Features coming soon
We are planning to add the following:
- Certain features are only recommended if you have canonical URLs configured to open in the app. See the Canonical URLs everywhere article for more details. In particular, Viafoura contains some UI elements which link to articles on your website domain. We recommend hiding these if they aren't going to open in the app. These include:
- active conversations
- your profile
- The ability to only allow users that are directly subscribed to comment. Users that are subscribed via iTunes or Google play will need to link their account first.
- Instead of hiding the Sign In button when using SSO, we could trigger the App sign in feature.
- Currently if you sign out of the app (which most users never do), you remained signed into Viafoura
What we need from you
- Comments must already be working on your web site (or a staging site)
- Your Viafoura Domain (vf:domain)
- The App Domain must be set up as a Viafoura Domain Alias for the web domain (Viafoura do this for you)
- Each article in app needs to know the ViafouraContainer ID and URL (vf:url, vf:container_id) - if you are using the RSS importer these will often come as fields in your RSS feed
- If some articles should not have comments enabled, this needs to be specified by a flag in your feed
- If you need users to log in automatically, you must have developed the Cookie Login endpoint on your web site
- If you want to use the Notification Tray you must have set-up redirects from your web site to the app
Auto-Login for Admins and Moderators
Viafoura require 3rd party cookies to work for these users for security reasons. See: https://documentation.viafoura.com/docs/how-to-allow-third-party-cookie-access
This means that the auto-login will not work while in the apps or in incognito but will work there for all normal users.