Comments displayed on confirmation/preferences pages

  • Plugin Author Devon Ostendorf

    (@devonostendorf)


    8 years, 11 months ago

    This is a problem that several people have reported encountering. After spending quite a bit of time trying to find an elegant, plugin code-based solution, I have determined that the best way to solve this is to explain what the problem is and how to fix it if it happens to you.

    This is a theme issue. Depending on how your theme author has chosen to implement the page template, you may be getting comments rendered regardless of how you’ve defined comment visibility system-wide. You would see this problem not just with Post Notif’s “pseudo” (programmatically-generated) pages (subscription confirmation and category preference pages) but also with any pages you create via the WordPress dashboard.

    Therefore, fixing this issue should be done in the theme code itself, not via a klugey plugin that somehow interferes with theme rendering. Further, the fix is simple and is patterned after the Twenty Fourteen, Twenty Fifteen and Twenty Sixteen themes that come with WordPress core, as well as the _s theme (https://github.com/Automattic/_s/blob/master/page.php), used as a basis for many additional themes.

    If you have access to edit your theme files, open “../wp-content/themes/[theme name]/page.php”, and replace the following line:

    <?php comments_template( ”, true ); ?>

    with these:

    <?php
    // If comments are open or we have at least one comment, load up the comment template.
    if ( comments_open() || get_comments_number() ) :
    comments_template();
    endif;
    ?>

    If you are uncomfortable with or physically unable to make this change yourself, I strongly encourage you to contact the author of your theme and ask them to consider updating their code such that it respects an admin’s desire to suppress comments. Actually, you should do this even if you are able to change the code yourself!

    Hope this helps,
    Devon

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/post-notif/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hi Devon,

    You write “…but also with any pages you create via the WordPress dashboard.” In the case of my site that isn’t right. I have this issue only with the pseudo pages, created by post notif. Manually created posts show only comments relating the post. In the theme configuration I disabled comments and no page shows them.
    Furthermore my theme (atahualpa) has not page.php. So I hope the creator of the theme can help.

    Thanks

    Plugin Author Devon Ostendorf

    (@devonostendorf)

    Hi oekoplatt,

    I am sorry you’re having problems with the way Post Notif renders its pseudo pages. As I look to the future and the possibility, down-the-road, of writing a second generation of Post Notif (based on lessons learned from this current plugin), I will seriously consider replacing the pseudo pages with physical page definitions. I did not anticipate how all-over-the-place theme authors’ approaches to implementation would be. That is not meant to be a criticism, but rather merely an acknowledgment that it is not safe to assume people follow the core-provided themes’ coding practices (and, admittedly, my approach for implementing the pseudo pages is not conventional). I would encourage you to contact the theme author or look at employing a different post notification plugin. I do appreciate you using Post Notif but don’t pretend to think it is the only plugin of its kind (far from it!) or the right choice for everyone. Further, I don’t expect people to change away from a theme they really like just in order to use Post Notif.

    Thanks,
    Devon

    If twentythirteen theme is used the <?php comments_template( ”, true ); ?> line is findable in /wp-content/themes/twentythirteen/single.php

    Thanks
    Boas

    Plugin Author Devon Ostendorf

    (@devonostendorf)

    Hi Boas,

    You are right, and unfortunately there is little I can do, from my end, to ensure that all themes (including those released several years back), will work smoothly with Post Notif.

    As I mentioned above, for the next major release, I will be seriously considering moving to the use of standard pages for the confirmation/preferences pages, in the hope that this will alleviate a larger chunk of theme-related issues people have reported.

    But, in the meantime, if you wish to both stay with Twenty Thirteen and continue to use Post Notif, I would encourage you to edit the necessary template files as I described above, replacing the hardcoding of comments_template to true with the conditional.

    Thanks,
    Devon

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • The topic ‘Comments displayed on confirmation/preferences pages’ is closed to new replies.

Tags