Changing “No Comments” to “Add a Comment” & email

  • christinabarefoottrimmer · Member ·

    I have settled on Connections theme; I have the fewest objections with it. I don’t want to do a lot of customizing, in fact I have no idea how to, but I would like to change the phrase “no comments” to “add a comment”. Why on earth would the designer put something so off-putting on the blog? I think it is discouraging people from commenting. I get about 100 hits a day and I think most of them are from people who have never been to a blog before but I suspsect would make a comment if they knew it could be done.

    So, is it easy to make this one small change? Do I have to upgrade to CSS. I will if necessary but the thought of it scares me.

    Actually I would also like to have a “contact us” thing that when you click it opens a blank email with your address in it, like from a website. I saw this question asked before and the answer was it can’t be done. But I saw it on another blog, a scrapbooking one, using the Thirteen theme. Of course I asked the owner and she had no idea how to do it. She was even more techno-illiterate than me.
    Thanks.

    http://barefoothoofcare.wordpress.com/

  • timethief · Member ·

    @christina
    The things you are asking about are hard coded into the theme. As for the phrase well it’s fairly standard. It simply indicates that no comments have been left as yet. The designer made these choices. If you want a theme with a contact page then you want Blix or Thirteen or …? (Themes with page templates is what you’re looking for in that case) here’s a link to reviews of the various themes that may be helpful http://engtech.wordpress.com/tools/wordpress/wordpress-theme-reviews/

  • drmike · Member ·

    Agreed. You would have to edit the theme files and, since we’re on a shared environment, you would be changing it for everybody who uses that theme.

    You are free to submit a feedback to staff from your dashboard with your request and reasoning if you want.

    As to the email form, it’s theme dependant. Some themes have it, some don’t. It’s up to the theme designer if they want it in there or not.

  • christinabarefoottrimmer · Member ·

    Hi, and thanks for the input. Here are my comments:

    1. Change “no comment” to “add comment”: Uncle.

    2. Email:

    I think this question is being answered before it’s being read. This is not a page issue as far as I can see.
    I have experimented with the various themes (um, three). Only Blix has a “contact us” page, and I “installed” that. When I have Blix active, there’s a “page” that says “Contact Us” and a FORM comes up (like it does on websites), NOT a blank email with the sender’s sig file, the recipients email in the “TO” box, and so forth.

    I checked Thirteen and Pool. Thirteen has nothing for pages, Pool has “default”, “archive”, and “links” templates. No Contact Us. But when I switch to either of these themes it keeps the Contact Us page, and when you open that page, a Comment Form is displayed which sends a comment to the blog. This is not what I want. I want the user to send me an email.
    It has been done in Thirteen, I’ve seen it done here:
    http://scrapbookdesigns.wordpress.com/2006/09/16/blog-competition/
    In the sidebar it says “contact us” and under that it says “email” and when you hit it the blank email form comes up.

    So, back to changing “comments” if this is the only change I want and someday I get really smart and figure out programming, can I copy/paste the whole Connections theme into my blog and then change the code for “No Comments” to “Add a Comment”? (switching to my own host, etc. of course).

  • silfrenwulf · Member ·

    If you title a text widget with Contact Us or something, then insert this code, should do it for you.
    <a
    href=”mailto:insert your email addy here”
    >Email Us<
    /a>

  • drmike · Member ·

    I hope you saw my bit about sending in a feedback. :)

  • christinabarefoottrimmer · Member ·

    I did. I’ll send in the feedback, although I’m not holding out lots of hope for that (largely because my “reasoning” is, because I would like it that way :-)). But thank you for the idea.

  • christinabarefoottrimmer · Member ·

    silfrenwulf, thank you for the secret code. It worked, of course! I knew it had to be a simple thing, but not for someone who knows no code. Next stop, figuring out how to put in a hot link to a url or thread (yes I’m that bad).

    Now, when the day comes that I want to make changes to the hard code by paying for hosting and doing whatever else it takes, can I keep the Connections theme, copy it, and make my changes, or is this a copyright issue?

  • drmike · Member ·

    You can keep the Connections theme. There should be a link in the footer to the theme designer’s website or you can probably download it from http://themes.wordpress.net

    Hope this helps,
    -drmike

  • rdd73 · Member ·

    Silfrenwulf, Thanks for the tip. Just added the code to my blog and am very pleased with result.

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