Replace Threaded comments with Google+ Comments in blogger

You might be familiar with the latest commenting system Google has introduced that integrates Google+ comments with Blogger blogs. This new commenting system is a major improvement over the default Blogger system, and it supports threaded comments. It also looks a lot better. We earlier shared a tutorial on how to enable this new Google Plus commenting system for Blogger blogs. But some people still have problems implementing it on custom templates. For them, we have compiled this short tutorial on how to effectively implement and use this new improved commenting system.

Switching to Google Plus comments

To enable Google Plus comments for your Blogger blog, you will first have to connect your account to your Google+ account. To do this, just follow these steps.

• Log into your Blogger dashboard, and choose a blog you want to connect
• Click on the Google+ button from the left sidebar
• Click on the Get Started button on the top-left side to connect your account. This will not appear if your account is already linked.
• Follow the simple instructions to connect your blog.
• Once connected, you will see an option Use Google+ comments on this blog. Checking this will enable the new Google Plus commenting system.

This will turn your Google Plus comments on for default templates. But it won't work for custom templates. For that, you will have to tweak your template source code and make some edits as instructed in the section below.

Displaying Google comments on custom templates

There are two ways to do this. You could either use the easy way, which is the Revert to default option, or you could do it the geek way, which is via the HTML editor.

The easy way

Custom templates have customized widgets that usually override the default settings. And that is why this commenting system might not work with custom templates. However, if you were to somehow remove those overrides, the commenting system would display on your blog without a hitch.

To do that, you can revert your Blog Widget to defaults in your template HTML editor via the following steps.

• From inside your blog's dashboard, click on Template from the left sidebar.
• Click on Edit HTML

(Before moving on, we'd suggest you backup your template, just in case anything goes wrong)

• Click on the Revert Widget templates to defaults button
• Now, Be careful to select Blog1 Widget from the list. Do not select any other, as it will reset other widgets to default as well.

This will solve the problem most of the times, but there's a big problem. You will lose the customization in your Blog Widget. So if you want to preserve the look of your current widget, then I'd suggest you use the alternative geek's way.

The geek's way

This isn't as geeky as it sounds. All you have to do is replace a couple lines of code with another. From inside your HTML editor, press Ctrl + F and search for "threaded_comments". You will see a chunk of code as shown below.
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == & quot;static_page&quot;'>

 <b:if cond='data:post.showThreadedComments'>

 <b:include data='post' name='threaded_comments'/>  <b:else/>

<b:include data='post' name='comments'/>

 </b:if>

</b:if>

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == & quot;item&quot;'>

<b:if cond='data:post.showThreadedComments'>

 <b:include data='post' name='threaded_comments'/>

<b:else/>

 <b:include data='post' name='comments'/>

</b:if>

 </b:if>

Carefully look at the bolded code, and then replace them with the following line of code.

<b:include data='post' name='comment_picker'/>

If you want to display comment count, you can simply modify the above line of code

<b:include data='post' name='comment_picker'/>