Adding comments to traditional content

Well one of the features we would like to add to some of our traditional content is to allow users to leave comments and also rate the content. You see our users are not too techie and we want to gently get them to start collaborating with each other and we thought taking baby steps was more appropriate.

We are planning to implement blogs, wikis, and discussion boards this year but we have so much traditional content and it's not interactive. It's great content but again you can't collaborate.

So we have formed a team to look into collaboration tools, and one of them is adding comments to our traditional content. In researching off the shelve applications I found Joomla CommentBox which looks pretty neat but I think the look and feel would be too different from ours.

I'm a big fan of widgets, and I usually use Widget Box for all my widget needs. Just now I visited their site and something told me to search for the word "comments". Oh wow, here it was. There is a widget called Easy Comments that you can add in the body of any web page and it allows users to leave comments. How cool is that? And it has a five start rating. I also found another widget called Instant Rating which combines star ratings with comments or star ratings with reviews.

We will probably continue to research this but in the meantime I've added the Instant Rating's widgets below to show you how they work. Has anyone found another way of adding threads and user ratings to their traditional content?