WordPress anguish
September 15th, 2008 9 Comments
After many hours of Googling and much trial and error I have finally given up on my hope of making a minor improvement to this site.
All I wanted to do was to make comments, and the comments form, show up at the bottom of each post, no matter what type of page it appeared on. By default, comments in WordPress only show up if you display a post on a page of its own. I know a lot of people who visit this site click the Podcasts tab. This displays posts in a category view, which means the comments form is not displayed.
WordPress, like MovableType, demands an extremely high degree of patience of anyone who wants to configure their own site. WordPress isn't as bad as MT in this respect (hence my decision a few years ago to make the switch across to WordPress), but it can still sap hour upon hour of your free time to make what you might expect would be the simplest of changes.
Given the popularity of blogging, there is real scope for someone to come in here and steal a market away from WordPress. I wonder what Google and Microsoft have up their sleeves? Microsoft already have the best tool for writing blog posts (Live Writer), I wouldn't be surprised if they had a WordPress killer among their plans for Live.
So for now, unless you're reading this on the front page or on a single-post page, if you want to comment on this post you're going to have to click on the heading above to display it singly and then scroll down to the comments form.
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September 16th, 2008 at 4:44 pm (#)
Alistair, You modified your site correctly -- just log out and you'll see the comments form below each post. At least I see it.
September 16th, 2008 at 4:48 pm (#)
By the way, I think people generally know how to leave comments on a blog post -- just click the comments link. I've only had 1 person ever write to me directly asking how they are supposed to leave a comment.
September 17th, 2008 at 10:09 pm (#)
Hi Tom,
Unfortunately it's not fixed. If you click on a category (e.g. Podcasts) you don't see the Comments form at the bottom of each post. I know a lot of people visit my Podcasts page and don't see the Comments form, so don't know they can leave a comment. They need to know that they have to click the post title to display the post on its own page and then scroll down to find the form. I just wanted the Comments form to be shown under each post - no matter what type of page it appears on.
If you know how to do this please let me know.
But anyway, hey, thanks for the comment!
:-)
September 19th, 2008 at 7:44 am (#)
When I click your Podcast button, it calls on your archive.php file to display the content. If you want your archive.php file to show the comment form, just tweak it in the same way that you tweaked the index.php or home.php files.
For some reason, I thought you had Subscribe to Comments plugin, so I didn't think you'd responded. I just checked back now and saw your response.
Let me know if this works for you.
September 19th, 2008 at 7:50 am (#)
Interesting. I did select Subscribe to Comments, but I never received a follow up email. And this post doesn't seem to have the Subscribe to Comments option, but other posts do. Hmmm.
Re another company taking WordPress' place, I agree that WordPress is frustrating, but it would be hard to best the hundreds of plugins that people have written for it.
I've heard great things about Movable Type, though.
September 20th, 2008 at 11:19 am (#)
Hey thanks Tom. That was easy!
I just added
<?php $wp_query->is_single = true; ?>
<?php comments_template(); ?>
into archive.php, in the while loop, just after getPost(); and it worked a treat.
That's the thing with WordPress. You just have to know that stuff. Once you know how to do it it's easy, but unless you happen to know an expert, or you strike lucky while Googling, there seems to be no way of learning how to do a lot of this stuff other than by putting in many, many hours of painful trial and error.
Plugins are another pain point in WordPress. I can't tell you how many plugins I've downloaded and installed and they just don't work. The "Subscribe to Comments" plugin seems to be one of those. When I installed it first it did send me an email (so I know it kind of works, given a fair wind, and if the moon is in the correct phase) but it seems like it's not reliable.
Anyway, thanks for helping me out with the comments Tom.
September 25th, 2008 at 9:43 am (#)
Hi Alistair
Been scouring the net to find an answer to the comment problem for my index page. Your solution worked brilliantly :-)
Thanks for that
September 25th, 2008 at 10:13 am (#)
Just realised, I need to do a bit more investigation. I would like the comments after each post, but not with the add comment box on each one.
Back to the drawing board :-(
September 25th, 2008 at 5:02 pm (#)
Sorry that didn't work the way you wanted.
Let me know if you find a solution.