blog.humaneguitarist.org

a change of theme and missing WordPress comments

[Tue, 20 Sep 2011 01:24:27 +0000]
Last night, I discovered that some old comments from about a year ago were no longer showing up on this blog with the Journalist 1.9 [http://lucianmarin.com/test/index.php?wptheme=Journalist] theme. So, I've spent far too much time playing around with themes tonight. I hate most WordPress themes because a lot of them, at least the free ones, don't seem to place a high value on readability. Too much razzle-dazzle. For now I've switched to something else and, using the Journalist CSS file, I replaced some values in the current CSS to make the text look better to my eyes. I guess at some point I should document the changes I made, huh? ... Update, September 20, 2011: Aha! It seems that turning off the WordPress feature that automatically disables comments on old posts was the problem for the Journalist theme. In other words, Journalist - as well as many other themes it seems - won't show comments even if they exist if commenting is turned off for a given post. This includes commenting that's turned off manually or because WordPress was automatically disabling the ability to add new comments to posts that were over a year or so old. I don't like that so I might tweak the Journalist behavior at some point. I think it's valid to turn off commenting for really old posts or because there are too many spammy comments appearing on a given post. But I don't think that means current users shouldn't be able to view older comments - those are often more valuable than the post itself!