Custom disqus_identifier not properly changing default value

I had to get some band reviews that were already in Disqus from my old site into my new WordPress band site. I only wanted the reviews on our home page so here’s what I did…

I looked at the code on my old site and grabbed the disqus_identifier value from there.

I defined and added a custom field named dsq_identifier to my custom page template and gave it the disqus_identifier value from my old site.

I’m new to WordPress and PHP and I’m sure this is a bad idea, but I needed to get this done, so…

I edited the Disqus plugin’s comment.php by adding this code after all the var initialization:

<?php if ( get_post_meta($post->ID, 'dsq_thread_id', true) ) : ?>
  disqus_identifier="<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "dsq_identifier', true); ?>';
<?php endif; ?>

Since I only want to display the review comments on our home page which has the custom field named dsq_identifier, I modified my custom template (which used by several pages). Here’s that code:

<?php if ( get_post_meta($post->ID, 'dsq_identifier', true) ) : ?>
  <?php comments_template(); ?> 
<?php endif; ?>

BAAAMMM! Worked the first time.

If you have any ideas about how to get this to work without changing the Disqus plugin code base, that would rock. I need to take a step back and really think this over after the new site is released in a couple of days.

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