Today we’re excited to announce the addition of not 5, not 10, but 16 new button options for your IntenseDebate comment system. This project has been a long in the making, and these new styles are now available in your Layout Settings page at http://intensedebate.com/edit-site-layout. There are 4 main button styles (apart from the normal text links): Default, Candy, Glass, and Square. Each style features some color and size variations, so you should be able to find something that fits nicely with your site’s theme.

Without further ado, we present the latest from our design labs:

Default

This is our beloved default button that’s in use across all IntenseDebate comment sections. We’ve introduced a twist with some new size variation: you can choose to only show large buttons.

Candy

Candy is the coolest of the cool when it comes to our new buttons. With 12 different color variations (in common colors ) there’s something for everyone. Our personal favorites include White, Light Blue (which is actually IntenseDebate-blue), Orange, and Green. You’ll actually find a similar button design around IntenseDebate.com – that’s how much we like them!

Glass

Glass is the classy choice. Available in White and Black, it’s a slick alternative to our flashy new Candy buttons. Glass buttons are designed to resemble clear or smoked glass.

Square

For those of you that might want something a bit more square, we now offer a variation to the Default buttons which features small rounded corners. It’s perfect if you don’t want your button too big, or don’t want it to stand out too much.

Head on over to your Blog Layout page to check out the new buttons and activate them.

Posted by Isaac Keyet in features

We’re excited to release 4 more translations this week and dish out some much deserved credit to the awesome folks behind them:

• Czech – Jirka Kouba
• Danish – Lars Nørgaard
• Swedish – our very own Isaac Keyet
• Turkish – Semih Aksu

IntenseDebate is now available in 24 languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Estonian, Filipino, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Latin American Spanish, European Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Ukrainian. And there are more on the way!

These translations are available in your Blog Settings page at http://intensedebate.com/editacct.

Don’t see your language? Give us a hand!
If you’re interested in getting involved, now is the perfect time! Please email us at labs@intensedebate.com for information. Thanks!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

Last week we announced the release of 6 new translations, and we’re pleased to release 2 more translations this week and dish out some much deserved credit to the awesome folks behind them:

• Polish – miguelm75
• Slovene – Marck Goran Lrencin, Aleš Gabrovec

IntenseDebate is now available in 20 languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, English, Estonian, Filipino, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Latin American Spanish, European Spanish, and Ukrainian. And there are more on the way!

These translations are available in your Blog Settings page at IntenseDebate.com.

We’re looking forward to making more translations available for use as they continue to get completed. So far we’ve received volunteers to help translate these additional languages (let us know if you would like to help with any of these!):

Don’t see your language? Give us a hand!
If you’re interested in getting involved, now is the perfect time! Please email us at labs@intensedebate.com for information. Ideally we’d like to have at least two Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër’s working together for each translation. Thanks!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

A little while back we opened up IntenseDebate for localization, and we received over 100 volunteers to help translate IntenseDebate to 43 languages.  Within a couple of weeks we were able to launch translations for 11 languages: Arabic, Croatian, Filipino, French, German, Malay, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Latin American Spanish, European Spanish, and Ukrainian. This week we’re excited to release 6 additional translations.

Here are the new languages that we’re releasing, along with the awesome folks who contributed to each translation:

• Bulgarian – Rado Stoyanov and his team
• Catalan – afontcu
• Estonian – Helari Hellenurm
• Italian – Tiziano Fogliata, Andrea Torre, Aldo Latino
• Lithuanian – Darius, Gintausas Kaveckas
• Slovak – terchulak

These translations are available in your Blog Settings page at IntenseDebate.com.

We’re looking forward to making more translations available for use as they continue to get completed.  So far we’ve received volunteers to help translate these additional languages:

Don’t see your language? Give us a hand!
If you’re interested in getting involved, now is the perfect time! Please email us at labs@intensedebate.com for information. Ideally we’d like to have at least two Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër’s working together for each translation. Thanks!

Posted by Michael Koenig in community,features

This is the first in a series of articles which will hopefully inspire and help you style the IntenseDebate comment system so it fits better with your blog. We’ve reached a point in IntenseDebate’s history where the basic HTML and CSS classes the comment system is built on is solid, so now you should be able to style it more than ever, without fear of your new styles breaking in future updates.

Styling IntenseDebate: Simplify comment design

If you have a really clean and simple blog, you might find IntenseDebate’s pretty glossy comment headers and rounded corners a bit too much. With just a few simple CSS rules, you can alter the comment header to your own liking. In this tutorial we’ll be modifying the .idc-c-h element, which is “ID language” for “.IntenseDebateComments-Comment-Header”.

How to use this guide
All styles can be added either to your “Custom CSS” box in your IntenseDebate admin panel (recommended, go to Settings>Custom CSS) or directly to your blogs/sites stylesheet.

1. First, we’ll remove the normal background from the comment headers, apply a top border and make sure the padding and margins look good.
   #idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-h {
background: none;
border-top: 1px solid #ddd;
padding: 3px 0 0;
}

   Background: none; means we’ve removed the normal background image. If you instead want a light gray background, you could try background: #f6f6f6;!

2. Next, we’ll remove the spacing around the comment elements that make it not align with our new pretty top border. If you add in these CSS elements, you should know how all of the comment contents perfectly aligned with the top border:
   #idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-h-inner {
margin: 0;
}

   #idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-t,
   #idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-b {
   margin-left: 0;
   margin-right: 0;
   }

   #idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-b .idc-btn_s {
   margin-left: 0 !important;
   }

3. Lastly, if you still want a special look for the comments posted by an admin, we can apply a special styling to admin comments by using the class .idc-c.idc-admin this class is used for all admin comments posted on your blog.
   
#idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c.idc-admin .idc-c-h {
border-top-color: #c00;
}


   This style will exchange the light gray border we just added for a very fashionable dark red shade.

Tips on styling IntenseDebate:

• When you want to start styling IntenseDebate, and need to know what the elements in the comment system are called, we highly recommend FireBug, a developer extension for Firefox. Using the Inspect feature, you can just click the element you want to style, and it will bring up all the CSS associated by it, including what the element’s CSS class is. Pretty handy!
• Look up the element you want to style, for instance .idc-c-h and then apply #idc-container-parent to the rule when you write the CSS. In this example, you would write #idc-container-parent #idc-container .idc-c-h to style .idc-c-h, the comment header.
• Put your new CSS rules in the Custom CSS box in your IntenseDebate admin panel, located at Settings>Custom CSS.

Make sure you check out our CSS Documentation for a complete list of elements you can style in IntenseDebate with tips on how to modify them, and feel free to let us know if you have any questions.  Until next time!

Posted by Isaac Keyet in features