How to Stop the Basically Theme's Comment Box From Displaying in Right Sidebar

Unfortunately, you have a lot of mark-up coding errors on that page — many of which can cause the layout problems you are having. In particular, the errors that have to do with extra tags or unclosed tags. Before trying to fix the problems you mention, you need to fix the mark-up errors (which may well resolve the problems):

https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Frecipesfast.livesmartinfo.com%2Ftest-1%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

This Codex page explains more about validating web pages:

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Validating_a_Website

Hi WPyogi,

OUCH!!! 78 errors and 4 warnings! A lot of them seem to be redundant. I have no idea how to remedy the identified errors. As I was setting my website up, I needed help on many things, so I Googled each thing that I needed help with and whatever solutions I found, I tried to implement them. Some “looked” like they worked and others didn’t. There’s no one to tell me if I’ve carried out each command correctly. The poor Comment Box lost its mind. Obviously, it no longer knows where it lives.

Thank you for taking a look at my mess. I totally agree that if I can fix these errors and warnings, the Comment Box will find its way home where it belongs.

WPYogi, is it possible that you can help me fix it? I’ve spent literally 15 days “struggling” to get the site to look the way it does right now – except for this problem of course. With all the invested time and heartache, I don’t want to walk away from it now. I KNOW it can be fixed. Please help me.

Yes, you CAN do it! The errors look like a mess, but yes, many are redundant (the business about using ampersands — which is not a big deal — don’t sweat those right now). And some will disappear when you correct another one (i.e. kind of a domino effect happens sometimes). You just have to go through and read where the error is and what it says — then look through the code in the relevant area to see what the problem is…

It’s not really possible for anyone else to help you remotely — as I don’t have access to your actual site (and you should never give access to someone on a forum). Just start going through them and you’ll get the hang of it. If you get really stuck, post back here and someone can likely help you with a specific problem.

Good luck :)!

Hello Again WPyogi,

Thank you for replying. I know it’s probably something very simple; but I just don’t understand it well enough to do it by myself. I’ve spent so many days on it already and honestly my frustration level is very high with this website right now.

You are right; giving access to a forum stranger is probably not the smartest thing to do. However, since you are the stranger and I don’t sense any ill-intent from you, how about I let you help me with these “simple” error messages and then I can change my password when we’re done? This website is in its infancy stages and getting it set up is literally ALL I’ve been trying to do as I do need to get it done sometime this decade.

I’m not that savvy at posting on forums, so can you please tell me how I can go about contacting you? You know how to do this stuff that’s been giving me a lot of grief. My patience with this website has grown thin. Please don’t walk away; help me put it to rest. If you absolutely don’t feel comfortable, I can appreciate that and hopefully someone else that’s a decent person can help me. Thank you.

If you need help outside these forums, consider hiring someone — you can post a job here:

https://jobs.wordpress.net/

There are also several “regulars” and moderators who do free-lance work — you can contact them via clicking on their profiles.

Thank you for responding once more WPyogi.

If I had the money to pay someone, I wouldn’t have spent now going on 16 days killing myself over trying to set up my “free” Basically Theme.

I’m obviously no HTML CSS expert; but I tried to be very careful as I was going along and all of a sudden there it was – the Comment Box stuck in the right sidebar.

If I can’t get help, I’m just going to, unfortunately, start all over again using a different free theme because if I use the Basically Theme again, I’m afraid I’ll get the same outcome. Obviously I don’t want to have to do that but the reality is more wasted time & grief, or money – neither option is desirable.

I can’t wait around much longer, so if no one comes to my rescue, I’m going to start all over as a last resort. But thanks for giving your response.

There are also several “regulars” and moderators who do free-lance work — you can contact them via clicking on their profiles.

Nooo, don’t do that. No really, don’t.

WPyogi, I know you meant well ?? but this is a 100% free volunteer supported forum. No one gets paid to help people here and this is not the place to hang a shingle either.

@worksmartinfo I am sorry you are having a rough time of it. It looks like you started with this theme as a base and created your own child theme.

That’s good but that may have been a little advanced as a starting point. The HTML and CSS can be tricky but learning it is worth it, you just have to go slowly until you get the hang of it.

I’ve been learning on my own site for years and I still pick up CSS all the time. ??

Try starting over again but with a simpler theme as the parent. Perhaps Twenty Eleven or Twenty Ten?

Start slowly and track your modifications, practice with Firebug to play with the CSS. You’ll get the look you want with practice.

So sorry — I thought that if people have those links in their profiles, it was so they could be contacted. Certainly did not mean to do anything “off” here.

Hello Jan,

I really appreciate your input. I actually did start with using the TwentyEleven Theme initially. But it turned out that the theme’s overall width just isn’t wide enough to comfortably display a 300 x 250 pixels ad within its right sidebar. I am too embarrassed to tell you the amount of time I spent on “trying” to widen the TwentyEleven right sidebar so that I could fit a 300 x 250 ad. It shrinks the ad to fit into its smaller width and I don’t want a shrunken ad. I just had the hardest time and after much frustration, I had to make a decision to walk away from it.

So that’s when I found the Basically Theme and saw that it was supposed to be a very simple theme to mold the way I want it and by default, it’s wide enough to hold a 300 x 250 pixel ad in its right sidebar. But now, as you can see, the whole thing is a mess! The amount of time I have wasted on both of these themes is just a crying shame. Overall, I found the TwentyEleven Theme to be quite inflexible and it has totally turned me off and I will not use it again. However, I’m willing to work with the Basically Theme again but if I do the same tweaks as I did before, I’m going to get the same results, right?

I really just don’t know what to do. I mean, I’ll have to go learning a brand new theme again and “hope” that I can do all my tweaks and it’ll behave. Of course I always use a Child Theme. I was hoping this WordPress Forum would be able to help me. Believe me, I tried everything I could before posting on the Forum.

I don’t see why someone that knows how to read simple page errors can’t just help me with the errors at that link WPYogi gave me (which I’m grateful for because it really broke down the stupid little simple issues) and then I can finally move on and make better use of my time.

Yes, HTML & CSS is an on-going thing; there’s always something more to learn about them. I think I was mostly putting codes in the wrong place – easy stuff for someone who knows how to fix; but I don’t know how. I “thought” I had put everything in the right place as that’s what I was attempting to do with each tweak. This whole thing has been very discouraging because I can’t seem to “finish” so that I can get on with my life. And now I’m going to have to start all over again I guess with some other theme – a 3rd time which is more downtime.

@wpyogi It’s all good, the links are there so you can visit the volunteer’s site. The part I was concerned was the for hire part. ??

It’s all good, honest. Your support here is much appreciated! Please keep answering posts here, I really do not want to discourage anyone from doing that.

I don’t see why someone that knows how to read simple page errors can’t just help me with the errors at that link WPYogi gave me

The simple answer is because it’s not that easy what you are asking. This is a self-help forum and learning is required, that’s really the whole thing.

Some CSS and HTML help is offered but that sort of effort is outside of what’s considered in-scope here. That’s why WPYogi appropriately suggested you try the https://jobs.wordpress.net/ site. You may have just hit the limits of volunteer support.

Again, I am sorry you’re having a rough time with it but there is only so much that is offered here.

Okay, thanks. I’ll move along.

@ Jan — thanks…I gotcha :)! And BTW, I always appreciate so much your tone and thoughtful way with people here. It’s inspiring and a great model.

@worksmart — hey, don’t give up or be too hard on yourself! You really can keep learning this stuff…take it one step at a time and don’t get overwhelmed or think you have to do it all at once. Everyone here started where you are and most people have learned by trial and (many) errors.

Hi worksmartinfo.

The big issues I think you need to look out for and correct are:
1. Multiple body tags – the body tag is supposed to fully contain all the contents of the page. There should only be one opening body tag and one closing body tag.
You currently have 2 <body> and 2 </body> tags, one ending midway through the page.

2. Open div tags. Your page will never look correct as long as you have div tags that remain unclosed. A quick check of your code shows 65 opening div tags and only 64 closing div tags. You may want to have a look for the <!– end #container –> as there is no opening div tag with an id of container, which would suggest that’s the problematic one.

As someone else that was very recently new to html and css, I thought I’d share some starters to get you on the right path. Pelase don’t take this as me being patronising, we all start somewehre – maybe this will help someone else if its too basic for you…

From my experience, Div tags are the biggest factor to check as so much of your layout depends on them.
Always make sure you have the same number of opening div tags (beginning <div) as closing div tags (beginning </div)

Leave yourselft comments in the code to remind yourself which piece does what – it makes it so much easier to see which divs are missing a closing div, or to see if you’ve duplicated a tag by mistake. For example, when closing a div, make a note of which div you’re closing e.g. follow the closing div tag with something like <!--end of main content column-->
Comments won’t appear on the site, only in the code so you don’t need to worry about visitors seeing them.

Indent nested code so that it’s easy to see which content belongs to which div / footer / section

Please could you let us know which tools you use for editing your html and css?
I would strongly advise against using the Editor built into the WordPress dashboard as your main editor. Although it’s very handy for small tweaks on the go, it can be much harder to spot mistakes due to the lack of syntax highlighting / colour coding and line numbering. Just a fairly basic code free code editor like Notepad ++ would make your life much easier, avoiding things like a mis-spelled / mis-typed tag breaking your whole page.

A word of warning – I would not expect this site to rank well with search engines, or to display consistently across different browsers in it’s current state due to the mishmash of tags from different themes and the amount of non-structural code that’s included e.g. script tags and style tags, so I would urge you to make all the above changes before putting the site live – please don’t just settle for making the comment box and sidebar display correctly.

[ Moderator Note: Please post code or markup snippets between backticks or use the code button. ]

Hello francomusso – Thanks for your input and you’re not being patronising. I will reply in the same order you wrote your post.

1. Multiple body tags – I know that wherever there’s an open tag, there also needs to be a closing tag. I also know that I can’t have two “bodies”. I could not find where <body> and </body> is. You must always tell me which template the problem resides in; otherwise I spend hours searching each and every template trying to find which one the change needs to be made in. In this case, I did a search in the header.php template but could not find them the way you have them written. I also search the style.css template and could not find it there either. I did not search any others.

2. Open div tags – I do not know which template to search for <!– end #container –> and even if I found it, I’m not sure exactly what to do with it.

You wrote:

“Always make sure you have the same number of opening div tags (beginning <div) as closing div tags (beginning </div)”

I have no idea where to start checking divs. I do use EditPadLite as my code editor and I can make it number the lines. I usually copy & paste the template I’m working on in it to have a better view when tweaking things. However, because it’s the “free” version, I do not get “colored” codes (and some other things they don’t give in the free version.)

You wrote:

“For example, when closing a div, make a note of which div you’re closing e.g. follow the closing div tag with something like <!–end of main content column–>
Comments won’t appear on the site, only in the code so you don’t need to worry about visitors seeing them.”

I don’t understand divs well enough. And until I know what I’m doing, I don’t feel comfortable to freely write notes to myself about them right within the template. Do you mean just write something about them with no beginning or end tags and obviously NOT within some other tags?

You wrote:

“Indent nested code so that it’s easy to see which content belongs to which div / footer / section”

Do you mean to just make a few blank spaces and then start writing code? For example like this which I just copied & pasted from one of the templates:

select[disabled],
select[disabled] option,
select[disabled] optgroup,
textarea[disabled] {
  -webkit-box-shadow: none;
  -moz-box-shadow: none;
  box-shadow: none;
  -moz-user-select: -moz-none;

I agree! I too would not expect this site to rank well with search engines, or to display consistently across different browsers in it’s current state as it’s very unstable and needs fixing beyond the Comment Box and Sidebar display. And speaking of that, I received a response from someone in my other post to this same issue that no one had replied to until this person did a few hours ago. He/She said that all I need to do is add this code to the bottom of my Style.css template and then it would fix the Comment Box being stuck in the right sidebar:

#respond form p {
   float: left;
}
#respond .comment-form-comment label {
   display: block;
}
#respond .form-submit {
   clear: both;
}

I tried it and it worked; but in Internet Exlporer, the word “Name” somehow got itself into the Email box, so it wasn’t completely resolved and I won’t bother using it. Even if I did, it would just be a quick-fix and the real problem would remain, as you and I both agree.

Because I really don’t want to start all over (but running out of time), last night I spent many hours searching for help on how to fix my “simple” errors. One site I found at https://webdesign.about.com/od/htmlvalidators/a/aa081407.htm says to start from the first error and then work your way downward because sometimes that first one alone might fix other issues too. So the first error I saw on my validation results is:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1"

I have NO IDEA how to fix that. I knw it’s in the Header.php template. I couldn’t find a fix after searching for help on it.

Another error I saw is this:

Line 326, Column 503: & did not start a character reference. (& probably should have been escaped as &.)

I have no idea how to fix that. I understand “Line”; but what does “Column” mean? After spending much time searching for help on what column means, I think it’s the amount of characters (including spaces) in, going from left to right. I don’t understand what the error is saying. It doesn’t tell you HOW to fix it.

Another error I found has to do with the DOCTYPE (in the Header.php template- which took forever for me to find that that’s the template it’s located in). I used the information from this website:
https://nekkidblogger.com/2011/doctype-in-wordpress-how-to-change-doctype/ which says I could put this code at the top of the page:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
   "https://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

and when I did, it crashed the page. So I deleted it and put back the original template.

This is a classic example of why my website is all messed up – I’m trying to find things all over the place to fix things and then it accumulates errors. I dont’ think I will be able to get through this; not to mention my frustration. Thanks.

Hi francomusso,

I decided to keep the code fix that was given to me because after defragmenting my computer and cleaning it up a little bit and shutting it down, the fix works on Internet Explorer now. It looks pretty good. So I’ll leave it displayed like that and if I can get help (from you or whoever is willing) to resolve those error issues, that would be awesome! Otherwise, well, I’ve just gotta get on with things and hope that the browsers will have mercy on me. It’s not that I don’t want to fix the “simple” errors; it’s just that I don’t know how to.