Customizing Thesis Theme – Removing Closed Comments Text

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On all of my blog theme customization, I routinely turn off comments on specific Pages like Contact and About.  It just seems odd to have comments there, but I guess it’s a personal preference.

I just got the Thesis them and am enjoying playing around with it, but I needed to do a bit of work to bend it to my will.

The Problem

In Thesis, the default theme puts the words “Comments on this entry are closed.” which is fine for a page or post that has had comments and eventually closed them.  But for a page that never has had any commenting, it just seems silly.

Additional note: This can be done in the CSS as well but I wanted to do this without hiding text or setting “display: none” in CSS to avoid the chance of getting dinged by search engines.  This will remove the text from being created in the first place.

The solution

Luckily, we can easily change this in our theme with just a slight change to the scripts.  Even if you’re PHP challenged, you can still make the change by following these simple steps.

First, go to your default Thesis directory (Thesis_16 if you use it out of the box.) and edit the file named comments.php.

Next, locate the section that looks like this:

if (!comments_open()) {
?>
 <div>
 <p><?php _e('Comments on this entry are closed.', 'thesis'); ?></p>
 </div>
<?php
}

(Hint: this begins on line 70 in my version 1.6).  Modify it to add the following text in red:

if (!comments_open() && !is_page()) {
?>
 <div>
 <p><?php _e('Comments on this entry are closed.', 'thesis'); ?></p>
 </div>
<?php
}

Last, save and close the file. That’s it.

Now refresh your page and Voila! no more bunk text.

Please note that this turns off the text on ALL Pages, which you may or may not want.  I don’t usually have any comments on my pages so it works just fine for me but YMMV.

Tagged as: theme, Thesis, wordpress