Ok, well, I started from scratch and got it working keeping the contentid as an int.
Here's the code in case someone else needs something like this... will probably streamline this later, but this works for now. Obviously, for what I need this for, I know exactly how the URL will be formed and what variables will be there which is why you see some of the code that you will see. But you should be able to figure this out for your own site should you need.
This will also keep the normal contentid as the article id if the preg_match() doesn't match an article you specify.
in "administrator/components/com_comment/library/component/plugin.php":
change the getPageId() function to the following:
public function getPageId()
{
// edited
//return $this->row->id;
// get pathname of url
$u = JURI::current();
$url = JURI::getInstance($u);
$url = $url->getPath();
// match on article names
if (preg_match("/abcde/", $url)) {
$jinput = JFactory::getApplication()->input;
$var1= $jinput->get('var1');
$var2= $jinput->get('var2');
$var3= $jinput->get('var3');
if ($var1!= NULL) $url .= "?var1=" . $var1;
if ($var2 != NULL) $url .= "&var2=" . $var2;
if ($var3!= NULL) $url .= "&var3=" . $var3;
// use crc32() to return an int
$retval = crc32($url);
}
else {
$retval = $this->row->id;
}
return $retval;
}
