WordPress 4.0 Comments Not Working With Thesis 1.8.5
“I felt a great disturbance in Thesis 1.8.5, as if millions of comments suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.” I didn’t realize this catastrophe until I was approving new comments on one of my sites today, and well, they were gone. If you’re still using Thesis 1.8.5 for a Wodpress site(like this one) and you’ve upgraded to WordPress 4.0 “Benny”, every comment on every page and post will have disappeared from the user facing views of the site. However you’ve likely noticed that these comments still exist in the backend. Even though These 1.8.5 is pretty old now, it is likely still used by thousands of websites as it is a stable, clean, customizable and easy to use theme. After a bit of searching, I found the answer in a random blog post, which led me over to the Thesis forums, which led me to this new comments.php file which was posted by girlie. Basically, save the file as .php (not .txt) and then FTP into your Worpdress install and go to /wp-content/themes/thesis_185/lib/classes/ and replace the comments.php file with the new one you just downloaded.(delete the old one, then upload the new one) Like many of us, I always use google when I encounter a problem like this, but the Thesis support forum is behind closed doors, so none of the chatter about this issue was indexed by Google and it took a bit longer than normal to find my cure. Product support forums behind closed doors are a pain, however I agree that in some cases they are a necessary evil. Hope you found this helpful!
Johnny O
That was a big help. Thanks for posting.
Mike
Thanks for the kind words, glad someone out there found it helpful!
Andrew
Another thank you! You just saved me a huge amount of time – really appreciate you taking the time to post. Thanks!
Mike
You’re welcome Andrew! Glad it helped you out.
Zulkifli
Thanks Mike for this posting. Very helpful!
Mike
You’re welcome Zulkifli!
Torsten
Worked for me too. Thanks a million times.
Mike
I think the new update for Thesis 1.8.X solves this, however it wasn’t available for a while after the launch of WP 4.0. If you still have your DIY Themes account you can log in and grab it.
Dan Kern
I just upgraded my Thesis 1.85 site (my guitar blog – http://www.sixstringsoul.com) to WordPress 4.0 and experienced this same issue. Mike, you’re a savior! The new comments.php file worked like a charm. I just renamed the old one to comments-old.php and left it as a backup.
Mike
Stoked I could help Dan! There’s a new update on DIY Themes for Thesis 1.8.6 which likely fixes some other WP 4.0 things as well. The fix I describe in the blog post above were prior to DIY releasing the 1.8.6 update.