Troubleshooting Wordpress - Missing Comment Body

Posted April 21st, 2008 by Purazar
in

WordpressWordpress? What? - You thought this blog was running on Drupal?

Well, you're right, it is running on Drupal, but my brother's blog is running Wordpress.

After doing some researching into Drupal vs Wordpress, and playing with some test Wordpress sites, I chose his blog up with Wordpress instead. Main reason - ease of use. Drupal is powerful, Wordpress is elegant and simple. I'm not saying one is better than the other, there is a place for both of them depending on the application. For my brother who is not proficient at PHP, MySQL, CSS and dealing with the intricacies web server and just wanted a simple way to blog, and publish his music and videos - Wordpress was the way to go.

I prefer customization and tinkering around with minute details to customize it to the max - I prefer Drupal.

Now that that debate is settled, onto the problem that we were having. Comments were working fine after the basic installation. Then suddenly, the comment bodies disapeared.

  • I looked into the CSS to see if the colour was the same as the background - Nope.
  • Went into the PHP to see if we mistakenly deleted the print comment_text(); line - Nope.
  • Looked in the MySQL database to see if the column with comment bodies had been nuked - Nope.

The solution ended up being pretty simple, but finding it took a lot of trial and error to get to.

There was apparently a plug-in that we installed that was messing with the comment bodies. We had installed:

  • AJAX Comment Preview
  • All in One SEO Pack
  • Audio player
  • FLV Embed
  • Google Analytics for WordPress
  • Google XML Sitemaps
  • wordTube

Google Analytics for Wordpress was the culprit. For whatever reason (I didn't have time to dig into details as to why it was doing that), it was not showing the comment bodies.

So, I de-activated the plugin, and lo-and behold there was an updated for that plugin. Did the update; which returned everything back to normal.

wierd

On April 21st, 2008 Ian (not verified) said:
I have google analytics plugin on my blog which runs wordpress 2.5 etc.. and iv had no such issues.. don't know if the plugin your grabbed was older or something. the one i use is the same one that i got back before 2.0 etc.. could have also been a conflict with the theme your using and how the plugin is witting into the header. still odd as hell though.

Yup.. not quite sure what

On April 21st, 2008 Purazar said:
Yup.. not quite sure what happend. I grabbed the plugin from the official page, so i don't think i got an older one. I also changed the theme back to classic and original, to see if that would help, and it didn't... that's when I started disabling the plugins to see if they were the cause.

Plugins...

On April 22nd, 2008 philipp (not verified) said:
Well, I could now list all the pros and cons of wordpress but you did a really good job. I have no experience with Drupal and I don't plan on having one with it since I just can't think of giving up the convenience and and established personalized theme. The thing about Wordpress is that there is a wide base of developpers. They are very eager, so once they are infected with the wordpress spirit they are hooked up with it. Some plugins do have errors and since a lot of people are giving them feedback it's only a question of time once everything gets repaired. The software is getting more complex and the plugins tend to mess up both new and already existing features... THUS my tip. Do not over-utilize plugins and if you use a lot of them you should test them beforehand. The 2.5 Plugin Error Site on wordpress.org should also help in questions like these: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Plugin_Compatibility/2.5 And the Forum bears a helping hand too: http://wordpress.org/support/ If you are a newbie among bloggers, do some research and figure out what platform is the most fitting for you because a change of platform can be a pain. A REAL PAIN!

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