Leaving comment messes up screen

Forgot to add:

The WordPress URL is https://mghachem.scripts.mit.edu/lawandrevolution

And the site address is: lawandrevolution.com

Thanks

Have you made changes to the theme files? Have you tried deactivating your plugins to see if any are causing that?

Thanks. I did make a few changes: I changed the size of the header font using the Jetpack Custom CSS editor. And I edited the footer text to add some copyright language. There may be one or two other changes that I can’t recall.

I have not tried deactivating my plugins — perhaps it is the Facebook button plugin that I am using because that one does appear in the Posts area? I will proceed to deactivate plugins one by one unless you think it is one of my theme changes that is the culprit.

Thanks very much for your help.

I don’t think it’s the theme – unless something you’ve changed has done that.

You really should not modify theme files especially in a default theme – as your changes will be overwritten and lost when WP is updated. It’s also crucial to have a clean copy of the default theme for troubleshooting purposes.

The better way to modify a theme is to use a Child Theme –

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

Thanks again. I’ll try deactivating the plug-ins and will create a child theme.

Any thoughts on the other item in my opening query? How to get rid of the extra “Leave a reply” line that appears above my posts, so that I only have a “Leave a reply” box below the post as it appears on the home page? I saw one forum recommendation on this point that helped but it had the effect of getting rid of both “Leave a reply” lines, the one at top before the post and the one below the post. If preferable, I will start a new thread/query for this.

Hi mghachem! I just checked your site and your banner is 230k, try optimizing it a little to help download times:
https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Image_Size_and_Quality

Thanks wetlight for the suggestion, I will look into that. Could the size of the header images be causing problems for the loading of the comments?

I tried deactivating plugins, and that seemed to work after I deactivated the Jetpack plugin. But then I lose the functions of Jetpack that I want, like the Twitter widget and other functions. Is there a way to keep the Jetpack plugin and still have my comment function work? Seems like it should be able to work together with WordPress given the developer. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

No JetPack should not have problems with twentytwelve – assuming you haven’t changed anything in the theme. Do you have other plugins active? JP might not get along with those. You could also try reactivating it – sometimes that kicks a misbehaving plugin back into line.

Thanks very much. I have indeed made a few changes to the theme: header font size, for example, and adding some footer text, as well as adding a favicon. Possibly one or two other changes. I went back and tried deactivating and then reactivating WP Google Fonts. That didn’t make a difference. Except that now when I try to post comments, the comment form reproduces my header text and then the page titles.

I have a feeling I need to rebuild this site from scratch using Twenty Twelve, create a child theme, put all the plugins back in, and redo my changes to header and footer, etc. Am I right? Or is there an easier fix? I did not use a child theme before making changes and realize I should do so now, but want to avoid a lot of new additional work.

Thanks for your advice.

I have a feeling I need to rebuild this site from scratch using Twenty Twelve, create a child theme

Yes, that would be a good idea – not just for this problem but so that you don’t have a mess down the road when you need to update WP and stand to lose all your changes ?? .

First backup everything.

Then copy your twentytwelve theme folder to your local computer (saved copy #2) – leave that one alone.

Then start making the child theme…

You should be able to move the .php files (except functions.php) that you changed into the child theme – and use a file comparison program to find your changes in the style.css file – move those to the new (empty) child theme style.css file.

If you changed functions.php, that’s more complicated…

Then replace the twentytwelve parent theme with a new copy – and activate that one – check to see that your site is behaving okay. Then activate the child, check it. Then add you plugins one by one and start checking as you make changes.

OK will follow that suggestion — thanks very much for the advice.

I followed the suggested plan above but am not having any luck.

I did not do the file comparison for style.css yet because I do not know where to find the “original” style.css for Twenty Twelve, I can only find the current one on my server using FTP. So I proceeded with the steps in hopes of being able eventually to compare the backed up style.css with a newly installed style.css, but I have not gotten to that point because . . .

As my next step, I could not figure out exactly how to replace the twentytwelve parent theme with a new copy — so I deactivated it first, then saw that I could delete it at that point, then I reinstalled it. But when I activated the newly installed twentytwelve, the “leave a reply”/comment function was still not working as described above, which one would not expect because it is a “new” copy presumably. And I noticed that my plugins were still there — in other words, I don’t seem to have a truly new, clean copy of twentytwelve in place and don’t know how I would go about doing this other than how I did it.

Result is, I have lost some of the formatting I previously had to my edited twentytwelve theme, before I made the child theme, and no luck with improving the “leave a reply” function following the above steps. And my child theme, which I tried to activate, no longer displays all of the images I had uploaded, among other differences.

I don’t see why the “leave a reply” function is not working — I don’t have all that many plugins and they are pretty standard.

Can you advise please?

Thanks very much!

Hi, sorry this has been so troublesome. I also just realized something which is that JetPack has a comments module – and it looks like you are using that?

https://jetpack.me/support/comments/

I just tested a comment on your site and it appeared to work. So if there are still problems, it may be a JetPack issue or you should turn off that module.

As to the child theme – it looks like it’s working correctly – I’m sorry about the extra work, but it’s really much better that you have it set up so down the road you won’t have updating problems :).

Changing the theme doesn’t change your plugins so that’s not indicative of a new twentytwelve parent theme.

Thanks very much, I appreciate this.

I believe I do have the Jetpack comments module in use.

But the comment function is not working (are you going to lawandrevolution.com rather than the other site?); when I try to “leave a reply,” I enter the text of a reply and then the reply box suddenly contains a version of my home page/header inside the reply box. And Firefox gives me a popup message that says something like I need to reload and an option to cancel or “resend.”

My child theme is not yet activated; it is missing something. How exactly can I do a file compare of the revised style.css with an unchanged style.css for twentytwelve? Can I get a download of the original style.css somewhere? That would help to identify what I ned to input into the new style.css of the child theme (for some reason, the child theme does not display all of my uploaded header images).

Thanks again very much for your assistance!