Bug Report – WordPress 5.5

Having the same problem, comments disappeared from the pages after update to WP 5.5.
Would appreciate any suggestions about making it work!

Have made one more experiment: installed wpDiscuz plugin, and comments re-appeared on the pages, BUT with some strange counter of them, like in a case of one comment the note on the top of comments says 3 Responses to the article, in a case of 2 comments it writes 4 Responses. Maybe some other plugin for showing comments could improve the situation better? After de-activating wpDiscuz comments disappeared again, but I still have wrong numbers for number of Responses given on the pages. I don’t really know if this bug related to the theme or plugin itself, although wpDiscuz has mostly positive responses and I haven’t found any mentioning of the same problem as I have.

There is a discussion about this bug at a forum on the Cryout Creations site: https://www.cryoutcreations.eu/forums/t/comments-not-appearing-since-upgrading-to-wordpress-5-5

But so far only users have posted — no representatives of the developer have posted or offered information, or even acknowledgement of the problem. (This is in contrast to two other theme developers who issued hot fixes very promptly for other issues tied to the 5.5 upgrade).

The thread includes a suggested modification to a theme file (/includes/theme-comments.php)– offered by a user — but that fix did not work for me. Even with a rollback to WP 5.4.2 I was not seeing comments — I had to roll back AND restore from database to get the older comments restored. So I think somewhere along the way the upgrade process makes a database change that impacts indexing of the older comments. The comments aren’t lost, they just don’t display.

I’m posting here as a warning to others. I might experiment again with the suggested file modification — but I’m very reluctant to make modifications directly to theme files because they will of course be overridden with any theme upgrade. And I don’t have the coding skills to write a function for the functions.php file.

It would be nice if the theme developer would post here to indicated whether they are aware of the problem or planning to address it.

I’d just add that I was able to get things working with a modification to the /includes/theme-comments.php – file. I think the reason it didn’t work for me before is because of database changes with the update process — and I had to roll back in order to restore the database.

If you want to make these changes, I would suggest using the comments.php file from the Kahuna theme as a model. Kahuna is another theme from Cryout Creations, but it has been updated much more recently — in June 2020 — and you can find its template here:
https://themes.svn.www.ads-software.com/kahuna/1.6.1.1/includes/comments.php

You can’t use that directly, because of the difference in function names — but the key difference is that it includes a “default :” specification within the switch statement, and that is the magic piece that assures that the script doesn’t come up empty.

I think there is a easy fix, on the file “/includes/theme-comments.php”
find on line 22 the following:
case '' :

Bellow that add:
case 'comment' :

Save the changes made, and upload to the server.
Should now work.

I don’t use these theme, but I use another that had the same problem and these modification solved the problem.

>> Before should look like these <<

function mantra_comment( $comment, $args, $depth ) {
	$GLOBALS['comment'] = $comment;
	switch ( $comment->comment_type ) :
		case '' :
	?>

>> After should look like these <<

function mantra_comment( $comment, $args, $depth ) {
	$GLOBALS['comment'] = $comment;
	switch ( $comment->comment_type ) :
		case '' :
                case 'comment' :
	?>

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by Linmp. Reason: Make code clear

The theme authors have pushed out a theme update that corrects this problem. You can find the zip download by going to https://archive.cryout.eu/?dir=themes/mantra and downloading the file called mantra.3.2.0-comments-fix.zip

(This update is not yet in the WordPress theme repository because of other technical reasons, tied to WordPress requirements)

NOTE – I am not affiliated with the theme developers – I’m just reporting on what I have been informed by them in response to my communications.