Twenty Eleven Comment Bubble

The default theme of WordPress current version is without question a great looking theme.

Starting from having an option where you can have TwentyEleven sidebar on the right of left, you also have so many abilities to change your site’s background, working with drop down menu, etc.

But of course apart of there are happy users about how this template looks, there must be some people who are not satisfied in some parts of this theme feature.

I personally like the cleaness and all, but I don’t really like the Twenty Eleven comment bubble that shows up in index page or home page.

I do really like the numbers where displays how many comments you are having, but I don’t really like the bubble’s image as the background.

Of course you can replace the image, but in this post, we will not discuss about changing or replacing the image, but I will show you how to remove Twenty Eleven’s comment bubble.

What we are going to do with this Twenty Eleven comment bubble

As mentioned in above paragraph, we will completely remove the bubble’s background and the number.

After it’s all removed, we will add the code where it will display the usual standard comment number and “leave a comment” text under your blog post title. (related: good blog title or names).

This is the screenshot;

In the screenshot above, you see that after the blog post’s title (red highlighted), we will have the “Posted on” wording, and then author, and the numbers of the comment that post has.

Notice that in the default TwentyEleven theme, it won’t show that number, but showing Twenty Eleven comment bubble.

And when there is not yet a comment in the associated post, you will see the wording, “Still no comment yet, leave a comment?”

Screenshot:

In this case, you can replace that wording as you wish. I will show where, in the coming paragraph.

Video tutorial how to remove Twenty Eleven Comment Bubble

Here are the steps and the video guide tutorial

Video tutorial

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Steps:

1. Access your blog files (wp-content) via FTP or login to your cPanel, and go to wp-content folder, and then “theme” then we will copy original content.php of TwentyEleven theme and copy it into child theme. (Yes, we are using TwentyEleven child theme in this demo, for reference, my previous video tutorial how to create Twenty Eleven child theme video).

2. Now inside the child theme folder (in this demo, I name the folder as, “MyTwentyEleven”), open content.php by clicking “code editor” icon in your cPanel.

3. Inside the content.php, look in the line 28 until 32, and find these codes:

<?php if ( comments_open() && ! post_password_required() ) : ?>
<div>
<?php comments_popup_link( '<span>' . __( 'Reply', 'twentyeleven' ) . '</span>', _x( '1', 'comments number', 'twentyeleven' ), _x( '%', 'comments number', 'twentyeleven' ) ); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>

You can comment that code, or delete them, in this tutorial, I deleted them.

4. Next, we want to add the number next to the posted on meta of the post with this code:

| <?php comments_popup_link( __( 'Still no comment yet, leave a comment?', 'twentyeleven' ), __( '1 Comment', 'twentyeleven' ), __( '% Comments', 'twentyeleven' ) ); ?>

Paste that above code next to this code: (line 24 of content.php)
<?php twentyeleven_posted_on(); ?>

Screenshot:

Note: The red font of the codes above, is the part that you can replace with wording or text as you want.

5. Save files whenever you make changes, and refresh your browser to test.

If necessary clear your cookies. That’s how we can remove Twenty Eleven comment bubble.