Geeklog Forums

Hi Dirk,

It's me again, still troubleshooting the same site. To refresh, the site was using Geeklog 1.2 (I believe) and they upgraded to 1.6 in one fell swoop. Some things broke. We fixed the Submit Story function with your help. Now we're hoping you can get us started on the Comment problem — in a nutshell, here it is:

When you click the Post A Reply button in the Comment Bar on an article page (article.php), it simply reloads the article.php page and does not give you a comment form. So no one can comment on anything from that page, which effectively closes comments after the first one.

This is because site users are able to comment if they click the Post A Comment link under the story extract on the home page — this link takes them directly to comments.php. But after the first comment, that link disappears and is replaced by View Comments....

The site is configured to accept unmoderated comments from logged in users only.

I'm wondering if there's a problem with the redirect on article.php, since the code never loads the comments page. But I've looked at the code and it seems ok, from what I can tell about Geeklog code.

Do you have any ideas where I could start looking to fix this problem?

thanks a bunch for any insight you might have. I'd love to get them up and running again, with all major functions working.

cheers,
Lise

Compare the commentbar.thtml template file from the Professional theme with the one in your theme. There were some changes there a couple of versions ago.

bye, Dirk

Hi Dirk,

I got a chance to work on my client's Comments problem today, and the breakthrough I was hoping for didn't happen. But I'm still optimistic.

Here's where I am. First, I compared the commentbar.thml file in the Clean and Professional themes, as you suggested and alas, they are identical.

Then I figured, what the hell, maybe its somewhere else in the theme, so uploaded the freshest, most 1.6-ready version of Professional (the one shipped with the latest GL release) and then, through Configuration, I swapped out Clean and swapped in Professional. Interestingly, the theme look did not change at all, so I went to the look at the database to make sure it actually updated the data in the conf_values table, and it was ok.

But even with Professional theme installed and enabled, the Post A Comment button on the article.php page still did not work -- as before, it just reloads the article.php page without showing a comment form.

I'm a bit mystified -- I'm assuming that when a user hits that button, the data is submit to article.php which then redirects it to the comments.php page. But that is obviously not happening in our case, so I'm wondering if there's some field that article.php wants that isn't showing up. But to test that, I'd have to start mucking around in the article.php code which seems ill-advised since I'm not advanced enough as a programmer to know what all of that code is doing.

Do you have any ideas that I could try? It doesn't seem to be a theme problem, much as I wanted it to be that.....

thanks again for your advice in this,
Lise

Actually, when you click on "Post a comment", you are being sent to comment.php directly (only the "Refresh" button would send you back to article.php).

Not sure how what you describe could happen. Do you have a URL I could look at (as a PM if you don't want to post it here)?

bye, Dirk

Hi Dirk,

Thanks again for getting me going in the right direction. I figured out the problem. You were right that it was the theme. They were using an older theme called Clean (good through 1.5). I loaded Professional up there, from the 1.6 install, and used the Configuration control panel to switch to it. The form displayed Professional as the default theme, but the appearance of the site did not change. (I realized later that this was because the login I was using had Clean as the default theme and Clean was still on the server -- doh! )

So realizing that what I was seeing was Clean, not Professional, I looked again at commentbar.thml, and it all made sense. First -- I was wrong in what I said above that the two versions of this page were identical -- they weren't. So I copied the code for the dropdowns and other comment buttons out of Professional, into Clean, uploaded it, and voila, it worked. The reason for this became obvious when I looked more closely at the old Clean code for comments -- there was only one form and it pointed at parent_url. Lesson learned -- make sure you're looking at the right theme. I was hamstrung by the fact that I had no idea what their site was supposed to look like.

Anyway, I think most of this site's users have Clean as their default theme, so if I just remove Clean from the server, they'll be safely on the Professional theme where I'm hoping that everything works.

Thanks again for helping me troubleshoot this -- it was knowing where to look more than anything, and with GL, I'm sometimes a bit unsure. Hopefully, solving the theme problem will solve other problems as well.

best,
Lise

Good to hear you figured it out.

An updated version of the Clean theme is available from our demo site, btw. You can try it out there and see that it does let you post comments :wink:

bye, Dirk