comment_template too big

  • I’m still surprised that there isn’t a simple table of parameters to pass to these things. Well, I made my first template from a website that I have. I’m working on the last painful items and finally chased down that my individual post pages are screwed up because of the comment_template.

    How do I tell this thing to use a smaller field for input? I have maybe 400 character width and it smashes in 768. So, the page looks pretty bad.

    I tried looking up parameters to pass to the call (no luck), I saw references to having my own comment php – but, I don’t see the damaging culprit in WP’s comment_template.

    What I see is the code generates “cols=100%” and this is causing the problem. How do I fix this thing? (If I take the generated code by hand and change this to say “cols=80%”, that looks fine. Where did it get cols? How do I tell it to knock it off and use the space given (or 80% or something that works)?

    These are the things which I think people must run into over and over and I just haven’t found the holy grail of information on how to make this work right. There must be a reason WP people don’t want to make it easy to set parameters on the calls – too obvious? Want only experts to be able to use WP? I don’t know but it is frustrating.

    So, can someone tell me how to fix this? Much appreciated! ??

    — Joe B.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • look in the theme’s style.css
    size for comment template should be in there

    Thread Starter joebeauchamp

    (@joebeauchamp)

    nope – nothing there. Since I “created” this template from a website, almost everything is “default”. I did run across a .comment… in a stylesheet that someone wrote about – so I tried adding it. I tried several ways – maybe I don’t know the format. Instead of spending years trying to learn everything about everyone’s different ways of doing stuff, I try to work with what is there and just make it work. There is plenty which still throws me about css, for instance, however, what I don’t know rarely matters. Maybe I could tell WP to use cols=80% instead of cols=100% (as it does) by using the css – I tried, but apparently, if it can be done that way, I didn’t do it the right way.

    But I’m “listening” if someone can tell me.

    thx!

    Thread Starter joebeauchamp

    (@joebeauchamp)

    OK, I hunted and futz around — looking and trying lots of stuff. This is probably very elemental to many people familiar with WP. So, they don’t read this, don’t care, or there aren’t that many who understand WP?

    In any case, I found a comment.php out there which set things up. I grepped everything for “cols=” trying to find what put it in. I screwed around with my style.css until my nose bled – or whatever. Finally, and I don’t know how I missed this one before, I found a comment.php with it in there, copied to my theme and modified it to be “cols=80%”. That worked.

    Now, why was this so tough? Why isn’t there a “roadmap” saying how you do x y and z? Are there just too many things to WP? Is it made to be obtuse?

    I have a lot of the same problems with css. When it comes to making a change, rarely does the author make it clear what goes where. So, maybe it is me – I’m used to “old style” programming where there is documentation and it tells you what to look for and everything is frequently cookie-cutter the same logic. Not so here.

    I appreciate samboll’s reply – thx!

    I hope others trying to create a WP template are more attune to the logic than I apparently am — or someone puts some stuff together to tell newbies to look for these things and where.

    [Not that it matters to anyone, but I’ve worked on whole systems and found one very useful way of finding things is by “debugging” the code – running it step by step. If I were able to see what put in “cols=100%”, I would have found it a lot faster. It would be nice if there were a way to process a WP page or post in this manner. But, there are probably few of us system types left, so it probably doesn’t make sense to put in the effort. Just maybe a suggestion..]

    I’m set at the moment – thx again.. — Joe B.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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