Len

heh. I ran into this same problem when I redesigned my front page. Long post titles wrapped to the second line causing that content block to drop out of alignment with respect to the others.

The fix is simple enough – create a new function then call it in whatever template file you want.

Add this to your theme’s functions.php …

function trim_title() {
$title = get_the_title();
$limit = "x";
$pad="...";

if(strlen($title) <= $limit) {
echo $title;
} else {
$title = substr($title, 0, $limit) . $pad;
echo $title;
}
}

Adjust the line $limit = "x"; to whatever you want. (say 20 for example)

Then look in the appropriate template file for the_title() and replace with your new function trim_title() If your post title is more than the limit you specified it will trim it to that specification. If it is less it will do nothing.

Give Justin Tadlock’s Get the Image plugin a try. It will display thumbnails according to the custom field keys you set up. If no keys were set up then it will pull the first image from the post and use that.

I can show you a way to do it without a plugin but it requires a bit of work and this plugin is so much easier.

Place the following in sidebar.php or whatever file your theme uses to display the sidebar,

<?php global $post;
$categories = get_the_category();
foreach ($categories as $category) :
?>
<h3>More News From This Category</h3>
<ul>
<?php
$posts = get_posts('numberposts=20&category='. $category->term_id);
foreach($posts as $post) :
?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
<li><strong><a href="<?php echo get_category_link($category->term_id);?>" title="View all posts filed under <?php echo $category->name; ?>">ARCHIVE FOR '<?php echo $category->name; ?>' CATEGORY &raquo;</a></strong></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

This will display the titles of the most 20 recent entries of whatever category the post displayed on single.php belongs to.

In other words, someone arrives at the home page of your blog. They start reading a post about cars that belongs to the Automobile category. The click the title (or read more link or whatever) and arrive at the single post page (single.php) to finish reading the article. In the sidebar will be a list of the 20 most recent posts belonging to the Automobile category.

To change the number of titles displayed simply alter numberposts=20

I just installed that theme locally to see for myself. I see what you mean about the comment form showing but not the actual comments themselves. The fact that I can successfully do it in half dozen other themes I tested leads me to suspect a coding problem somewhere in the comments template file but I haven’t got the time to debug right now.

Edit: if you have the time you may want to carefully compare the comments template file of that theme to another such as the default theme

I see what you mean. Try renaming page-comments.php to page_comments.php then reselect/reassign whatever page you want to use that template file.

I’ll have a look at the theme.

I’ve seen this error before and am not sure what causes it. If you can access your database via phpMyAdmin you can change it right there. Mark has an easy to follow guide here.

Be careful when proceeding. You will be interacting directly with the database. There is no “undo”.

Do you have Akismet installed/activated? You might also want to check out Bad Behaviour. It blocks many malicious bots from even accessing your site which is a good thing since most spam is auto-generated from bots/scripts.