Blog Summary function isn’t working as expected

@kip-carter,

I’m just getting things installed and setup and having some difficulty which I’m fairly sure is simply my ignorance of WordPress.

Not your ignorance of WordPress per se, but your apparent misunderstanding of how online commenting works (irrespective of platform).

2. What I’m finding is that in order to give access to the comments for users they must click on the title of the blog article to get to a page with the comment at the bottom and navigation to advance or rewind the blog view from the current position.

This is the expected, and in my opinion, should be the desired, behavior. And guess what, this is how EVERY OTHER BLOG out there works.

Categories are topics, like sections of your favorite dead tree magazine. They are containers for individual articles.

You don’t want comments on the entire container with different and numerous articles in it.

Instead, you want comments on the individual articles.

And especially for you, who is abusing using “category” as container for different blogs, you don’t want comments on the entire blog as a whole, but on individual articles inside the blog (category).

That’s why users must click to go to the individual article to leave a comment.

This is very confusing for the user,

No, not at all. This is how all websites work.

Just check out your favorite newspaper’s website, it’s exactly the same experience — click to read individual articles, with the comment form, if present, at the bottom of the individual article. (Except that the articles in each category may be laid out in columns, whereas yours is presented in a linear/vertical flow).

George,
Thanks for the reply.

I think in my effort to provide a complete picture I may have pulled you off the primary question which is ‘why are not my summaries not showing up on the feed page’.

I don’t have an issue with the user clicking on the title to get the full article, but I do have an issue with the full article being displayed without the comment box.

Hope that points this to the core question better.

Regards,
Kip

This seemed confusing so I set the option ‘For each article in feed, show’ to Summary (Dashboard > Settings > Reading).

primary question which is ‘why are not my summaries not showing up on the feed page’.

This setting is for RSS feed, which is a way for people to subscribe to your website and automatically receive your latest posts in their RSS feed reader. The setting has no effect on how content is display on the site itself.

I don’t have an issue with the user clicking on the title to get the full article, but I do have an issue with the full article being displayed without the comment box.

Again, the comment box will only be displayed on the individual article page — so it will not display in archive listings even if you have the full content displaying.

If you want to switch to summaries on archive listings, with the Twenty Seventeen theme you’re using, the only way (without writing code) is to click and insert the MORE button (in the post editor) below the the desired cutoff point. And you’ll have to do this for each post that you publish.

If you want to automate this for all posts, you need to use a child theme. (Note that this is a limitation — or rather design decision — of the specific theme you’re using).

Hope that clears the apparent confusion.

George!!! Thank you!… It’s a bit clumsy but it works great! Just what I wanted to accomplish… I’ll have it up and flying here shortly!

Thanks again!

Kip…