Comments

One thing I did not consider when I made this theme (even for some of my other themes) is that some people like to show the full post instead of excerpts or summaries in the blog home page. This being said, I will need to add a “Comments” link on the blog summaries post info line for the next theme update.

However, so you do not have to wait for this update, I will follow up shortly with a solution for you.

If you do not hear from me within a couple of hours, reply back here.

I have a solution for you that puts a Comments link next to the publish date, author, etc on the blog home summaries (and full posts such as yours).

IMPORTANT: Because I’m going to have you edit a theme file, make sure you keep a backup copy of the file we will change “template-tags.php”. Normally changes like this would be done with a child theme, but this will be part of the next update.

(1) Go to Appearance >> Editor, and then open the file “template-tags.php”. When it’s open, copy all that code and paste it into a text file somewhere safe. Just in case we need to revert back to it if anything goes wrong.

(2) With the template-tags.php file open in the editor, slowly scroll down and look for this line of code:

if( esc_attr(get_theme_mod( 'show_edit', 1 ) ) ) {
    edit_post_link( esc_html__( 'Edit this Post', 'longevity' ), '<span class="edit-link post-meta">', '</span>' );
    }
  }

Copy this code here:

if ( ! is_singular() && ! post_password_required() && ( comments_open() ||        get_comments_number() ) ) {
if ( esc_attr(get_theme_mod( 'show_comments_link', 1 )) ) :
echo '<span class="comments-link">';
comments_popup_link( sprintf( __( 'Leave a comment<span class="screen-reader-text"> on %s</span>', 'longevity' ), get_the_title() ) );
echo '</span>';
endif;
}

Then, just ABOVE this line of code…

`if( esc_attr(get_theme_mod( ‘show_edit’, 1 ) ) ) {‘

…paste my code there. Click “Update File” and then check the front of your site blog and see if the comments link shows up and is functional. It should sent the reader to the full post view that contains the comment form and comments (if any).

If anything goes wrong, then clear out the code from the template-tags.php and then copy and paste the backed up copy you made before we started, then click Update File. That will put it back to its original code.

Ok, thank you! I will attempt to work on this right now …

Ok, I did it… what I see now is a number of comments – is that what it was supposed to do?

On posts that have NO comments – nothing is different? No ‘comment’ link is shown?

https://www.themorningsideoflife.com

Correct on what it’s supposed to do. It will show how many comments, but it’s a link for the person to click on to view the comments and to also leave a comment. When there are no comments for a post, then the link will say “Leave a Comment”.

If you need the comment link to be more bold, you can do some custom CSS like this:

.comments-link {
    font-weight: 700;
}

Thank you! This will do for now! I appreciate it!!!

You’re very welcome…however, before we close this topic, was there a theme that you used or seen before that had the comments layout that you were wanting to have? I’d be curious to check this out because I’ve never seen the blog home page with the comments showing on each post on the same page, other than having the comments link only.

I used ProPhoto themes for the last few years – they all automatically had comments at the bottom of every post. I used different themes before that but couldn’t recall what they were off hand…

when you blog photography – its important to keep the photos and the comments together on the main page as people scroll ??
That being said – they usually folded so if there were lots of comments they didn’t ALL show unless you clicked to ‘show all’

Thanks again!

Thanks for the example…the samples ProPhoto usage from others shows the comments as an accordion concept, but still something a reader clicks on. The only difference is that the comments drop down in view instead of taking the person to the full post. I can see a potential problem though should a site have a ton of comments, but also eventually affecting page load times as well.

I will be honest, this is an unusual and not very common design, but does give me a few theme ideas to possibly create later…perhaps with my next theme I will be developing, which is a photographer’s theme concept.

Yes – they always had a big beautiful – theme matched button at the bottom ‘Comments’ so it was very easy for a person to read the post and then follow with a comment. They also had theme matched Social Media buttons at the bottom of each post so it was really appealing to look at.
Not having all of the comments automatically display is a better cleaner idea – you just click and they drop down if you want to read them. I’m so used to this that its been hard to change themes this past week. Getting friends emailing me saying ‘I tried to comment but I can’t figure out how’ is too time consuming, however your ‘fix’ is helping for now ??