The Trouble with abandoned WordPress Themes, Part 2: Comments no longer showing

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As a blogger at the DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org Weblogs, I love the way my blog The Things That Are Better Left Unspoken looks. However, the theme I use is an abandoned theme and hasn't been updated in the last ten years. In my defense: It was current when I started blogging fourteen years ago…

WordPress is a dynamic platform. Its developers are doing an awesome job, when you look at the percentage of websites running WordPress as a percentage of all website (32%). However, some of these changes are breaking changes.

The change du jour

Today's change was about the way comments are displayed. After upgrading to the latest version of WordPress, comments would no longer show on The Things That Are Better Left Unspoken, but they would still show on other blogs. This lead to one conclusion: the theme is broken. Again.

According to the author(s) of the Graphene theme, this is caused by a change in default comment type in the database since WordPress 5.5.

Our change

We searched a bit more and found the solution. In the theme's functions.php file, we replaced the text that read:

		switch ($comment->comment_type)
		{
			case "":
?>

with the text:

		switch ($comment->comment_type)
		{
			case "comment":
?>

Our approach going forwarded

The DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org Weblogs were recently outfitted with a child theme based on one of the official WordPess themes. This way, the official theme can be updated without problems when an update becomes available while the look and feel of the website remains intact.

Going forward, my blog The Things That Are Better Left Unspoken will be configured in the same manner to accomplish the same level of information security and practical day to day update approach.

Stay tuned!

Author: Sander Berkouwer

Sander Berkouwer is the author of the Active Directory Administration Cookbook, speaker and blogger at DirTeam.com and ServerCore.net. He is awarded Microsoft MVP, Veeam Vanguard and VMware vExpert. Since 2009, Microsoft has awarded Sander with the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. Since 2016, Veeam has awarded Sander with the Veeam Vanguard award.

3 thoughts on “The Trouble with abandoned WordPress Themes, Part 2: Comments no longer showing”

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