peterdouglas

OK, I’ll play around with it a bit. If it’s too overwhelming, I’ll outsource the setting up of WPML to someone and I can do the rest of the website once that’s done. Thanks again!

That looks good! The plugin works better, and differently than I thought. A while back I wanted to convert this site to WordPress, and people were leading me towards a plugin that would translate the content as well as make the site multilingual. Even though I watched the video and read the description, I wasn’t clear on what the WPML plugin could do.

As long as it’s reliable enough and future-friendly with new versions of WordPress, I might just go for it. Otherwise, a more cumbersome, and low tech way, but plugin-free way is to do the three WordPress installations.

So, if I use the WPML plugin, like you did, I would have almost the same website structure except that there would be a bilingual home splash page where people select the language, a bilingual Daily Deal page where they can print a coupon, and then of course the English pages with English navigation and French pages with French navigation (and URLs with French wording). So it could I have:

mysite.ca and mysite.ca/special (bilingual pages)
mysite.ca/en/contact-us (and other pages, with the “en” subfolder and English navigation)
mysite.ca/fr/contctez-nous (and other French pages in the “fr” subfolder and French navigation)

And then on all English pages, it has a link that says “Fran?ais” that takes them to the corresponding French page, ie: on contact-us takes them to contactez-nous (and not the home page). I see you have your site set up that way. Was it hard to do, or require any custom work to get it to do that?

Merci! ??

Thanks. I’ve heard of translator plugins before – might have even been this one. I decided not to use it in the past because the main purpose of the plugin seems to be to to translate from English to another language, and as an added benefit, adds a language switcher button. The translations are usually readable, but far from perfect. And in French, as we need it, it tends to use French from France, which has enough differences from French-Canadian Quebecois French that’s its noticeable with spelling and terminology. Kind of like using British English expressions, terminology and spelling on a site geared to a US audience.

The website content is already fully and professionally translated and SEO optimized. The navigation and resulting URLs have almost 10 years of good search page indexing and backlinks (can be overcome with redirects I know). But since about half the site visitors are English and half are French, we would really like to keep a unilingual English navigation menu on the English pages, and a French one on French pages.

I might be misunderstanding the WPML plugin, though I watched the video and read the description. I think it will be a very handy plugin when I need a quick translation on a new website, but for this one, I really need to reuse the French content that’s already created, professional proofread and SEO optimized. Let me know if I’m misunderstanding the way this plugin works.

If so, let me know if I don’t use this plugin, if the only way around this is to set up 3 WordPress installations. I need it be easy for the business owner to edit, so I don’t want to use html pages they’ll need to learn Dreamweaver to use. I’d rather just have it all in WordPress, even if they need three WP logins.

Yep, I got it! Thanks for all the help and suggestions. ??

To save you from looking through all of that code, it starts at line 82.

Good call – there was another comments.php file in Classes. I’ve put a link to it below. Since posting it, I’ve added some wording to indicate that the fields are optional and that all replies are moderated.

https://pastebin.com/ZXxwkCyT

I guess I’ll be fine until a new version of Thesis is released, as I had to hard code that file. I don’t think this can be accomplished with hooks unfortunately.

Sure, here’s my code for comments.php:

https://pastebin.com/uEdjYEUZ

Thanks! I had actually looked at that file, but not being a very strong programmer, I was afraid to tamper with it. In the past, I’ve made edits to PHP files and made the site inaccessible and had to restore the original file though FTP.

Here’s the entire comments.php file. Can I add “Optional” (with double quotation marks). For example:

'comment_author' => "Optional" $comment_author,

Or is that the wrong way? I don’t want to break the PHP and make the site go down. One wrong character can do that. Ask me how I know, lol!

[Code moderated as per the Forum Rules. Please use the pastebin]

Hey guys, thanks again for the tips! I just posted my question on the Thesis support forum too, seriously doubting it was a Thesis issue. But, after a couple of suggestions, someone tipped me off that there were two places in the Thesis theme that comments can be controlled (under Display Options and Comment Options). I did not know that – I thought I had allowed commenting but did not know of the second section.

So, the good news is that I now have commenting enabled! Looks like I did not do any hard coding after all, although I was sure I had. At least now I know where to look if I run into this again. I have a feeling one of my other sites may have been hard coded to remove commenting… But the bad news is that it looks like I have to manually edit each of the 30+ posts to individually enable commenting.

Since we’re on the topic of commenting, is there a way I can enter the words “Optional” beside or below the fields that say “Name” “Email” and “Website”? Being a sensitive subject (Bankruptcy), people may not feel comfortable leaving any identifiable info, and I don’t want them to think it’s mandatory that they give any of it. Can I have only the comment box and submit button appear?

Thanks! ??

Thanks again! I had thought of index.php but it contains hardly any code, just:

<?php
/**
 * Cue the star of the show...
 *
 * @package Thesis
 */
thesis_html_framework();
?>

(That’s actually the same index.php as seen through Appearance >> Editor as well as by going directly to wp-content/themes/thesis_18/index.php). Unless I’m missing something, that doesn’t look like the code I want.

Thanks for the Thesis File Structure. I checked all other files called comments.php and index.php and compared from an unedited website to this one. The all had the same amount of lines and I did not see any code commented out.

Back when I originally set up this website, I was mostly concerned about not having comments, so probably didn’t mess with trackbacks. I’m not sure where that code is being called from. Is it possible that I might have edited a WordPress file and not a Thesis file?

Hi, thanks for the tips! I had also posted my question on the support forum for the Thesis Play skin. The creator of the skin just replied back and said that Thesis Play should have nothing to do with the comments, except for the styling. Unless it’s in the parent theme (Thesis). But I have a feeling I probably used Dreamweaver back then to delete or comment out some code for the comments.

The theme does not seem to use a file called single.php – at least, I cannot find a file with that name anywhere. Which WordPress files are likely to contain code for the commenting? I’m going to look through and see if I can find that, and then compare to an unedited version of WordPress. Unfortunately none of the WordPress updates overwrote my edits, lol!

I’m using the “Thesis” theme along with a skin called “Thesis Play” (both premium paid products). I’m using WordPress 3.2.1 (the most current as of this posting).

I think you guys gave me a hint… I’m going to do some looking around, but again, I’m really an amateur at this, so I could be looking in the wrong places.

I don’t think I commented anything, unless you mean look for the commenting put there by WordPress?

I guess it wouldn’t hurt to upload and write over one file at a time, providing there’s a backup of the current version so it can be restored if needed. Any hints on which files I should look at first? I’m not a very proficient coder – I just know enough to get into trouble, lol!

Awesome! Thank you so much! You have no idea how much time I spend trying to get this to work. Thank you again! Have an awesome day ??

Beautiful, thanks! I posted the question in the other forum as I thought it better belonged there. And now it works, thank you so much! ??