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WordPress 3- Changing “Leave A Reply”

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How to change, modify or customize  “leave a reply” text in Twenty Ten wordpress 3 default theme to leave a comment in your blog.

In today wordpress 3.0.1 tutorial, we are going to change the wording “leave a reply” in your comment template  just after your blog post and before comment box.

This is probably needed if you have specific blog or site’s niche and want to be “different” to your commenters.

It is very recommend that you change those text, because it is more friendly and less formals. Of course, if you have a business blog, you may change it too to more related for your business.

However it is really optional, if you are afraid to change anything, then leave it by default.

The text we will modify and change.

The steps:

1. Look for the directory where you install wordpress.
2. Find wp-includes folder.
3. Copy comment-template.php by copying it and rename it to, for example, comment-template1.php
3. Open comment-template.php file.
4. In this demo, i use notepad++ it is in line 1542 (see image)

The line of the code that should be modified.

Find this code: 'title_reply'          => __( 'Leave a Reply' ),

Change it to: 'title_reply'          => __( 'shoot me your comment' ),

Of course the text above is just an example 🙂

5. Save the file. Refresh your blog and try it.

  • Tips: you can change the button from post a comment to shoot, or anything you like.  In case something is wrong, rename back the copy of comment-template1.php to the original(comment-template.php).
The modification i used for this demo.
The other modification (button)

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Comments

  1. I always like to change the comment button on my sites. Submit seems so ‘cold’. I’ve changed mine to ‘Have your say!’. I think doing this makes a site seem a bit more welcoming, a bit more inviting.

    Warmest regards,

    Karl

    • @Karl Foxley, Hi there

      How true, its funny because i just realise that my button still show “submit” haha!

      I will definitely change after replying comments today, thanks for the great input!

      Best,
      Kimi.

      • @Kimi,

        Hey Kimi, I see you’ve changed your comment button text, much more welcoming. 🙂

        • @Karl Foxley, Yes! 🙂

          I changed it yesterday, it looks good for now, but might change the wording i find better one, thanks Karl!

  2. Thanks,

    This is a great article and a great website. I liked it very much. It will help me to optimise my websites in europe. I have website in travel and that means a lot of seo work !!

    Thanks a lot and greetings,

    Dave and Carol
    Seo and Travel Website in Europe, France

  5. Great post, just what I was looking for!

    Can you do the above but specify different pages?

    eg, on home page perhaps have “Shoot me a comment” and on another page have “boast about it here” ?

    cheers, David

  8. Maybe I didn’t read the tip correctly, but are you suggesting to make the changes in the file that’s in the wp-includes folder? I would think that you would want to incorporate the change into the theme files so that it doesn’t get written over during core files upgrades.

    • Hi Shell,

      Yes, editing files other than twenty ten files will be overwritten after upgrades, but this kind of changes are very seldom to make, so we have to change manually again.

      It is the easiest and not hard to do, thanks for leaving a feedback.

      • Better override the function in the twenty-ten theme’s comments.php file, at the bottom of this file you’ll find

        you could replace it with something like this —

        ‘Don’t just leave a reply, let me know what’s on your mind’)); ?>

        (other array items can be added with a comma in between them)

  9. Hey, I just posted a comment with some code and half of it got eliminated when I submitted it. Disregard in this case, thanks, –s

      • Hi, I have done that the second time around and it didn’t make any difference. I got the same result as in my first try, before I tried the code tags, except I got blank yellow boxes instead of just blank space — I was hoping you would delete both replies. (i.e., the one in the previous thread, above, dated dec 1, 8:46, should also be deleted)

        The code tags appear to only change the style of the text, not allow code to be inserted within the text. The comment text field acts as if it were in “html view” in a post and tries to parse out the code I am inserting.

        I am trying below replacing the angled brackets with their html equivalent, please delete it if it comes out all botched again, thanks, –s
        —
        Better override the function in the comments.php file, in the twentyten theme at the bottom of comments.php find

        <?php comment_form(); ?>

        replace it with

        <?php comment_form(array(
        'title_reply'=> 'Don't just leave a reply, let me know what you think')); ?>

  10. Yes, it works, I wouldn’t post something off the top of my head, I tried it first. Since it’s an array, if you need to change additional defaults, they can be added between single quotations with a comma in between.

    Granted, I think the twenty-ten theme is extremely complicated to customize, I’ve done plenty of customizations using the previous default theme there and there was the odd item here and there I would need to bring in from the core files into the functions.php file, but for the most part it had plenty of stuff available for customization within the theme (the default comments labels for instance were right in the comments.php file). I suppose they view it as an improvement that all that code just gets called in with this one function <?php comment_form(); ?> but it really makes me wonder.

  11. congrats for your blog, i´m working with twenty ten theme, i´d like to customized the – leave a reply – expression but i haven´t been able to find the comments-template.php file inside the wp-includes folder, i´ve gone around stuff and no success yet, what do you think is happening?

      • hi there! how silly i can get sometimes!
        i hadn´t notice there were subsecuent pages containing the rest of the template files in te wp-includes folder, i am grateful for your support and tutorials.
        This blog is still in the making, my first one to complement with a touristic website, check it out and thanks once more.

  15. I found out that if you don’t change the default “Leave a reply” for comments on WordPress you’ll be the unfortunate receiver of more spam messages, that’s because with google advance search ( that all spam bots can use ) the “allintext:Leave a reply” search (without the quotes) is giving a list of all wordpress blogs, where most-likely the machines will just post casino links automatically.

    Hope this is useful,
    Robert D.

  16. i think that change is nesesarry and for spaming reasons…its better to have something different than leave a reply…..like…whats your opinion….more difficult for spammers to find your blog

  20. Great article, I always want to change my blog so it will be different. Thanks so much. I like this post/

  22. Hi
    thanks Great
    But can you Please give me some guide lines for wordpress thesis,
    How can i change “leave a comment” text..
    thanks
    Please email me when you write some articles or send me detail..
    thanks

  23. OH THANKS!
    I try to translate this almost drive me crazy!, 4 hours without results! XD

    thank you very much in 15 minutes I did, thank you!

  25. Thank you for sharing this clear tutorial on how to change “leave a reply”. Actually, I am planning to customize this section, not only the words but also the box or the comment section box. Is this possible? I will use this to promote my controversial youtube videos.

  26. Because of the way blogs are structures and how they work, sometimes, it can be said that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for blogs is one step further than websites. While most of these techniques eventually also require a some tweaking, blogs need to be tweaked from a systems perspective – one single change to the blog template will affect all the individual posts.

  27. Great article! This is the type of info that are meant to be shared across the web. Shame on the search engines for now not positioning this post higher! Come on over and talk over with my site . Thanks =)

  28. OH THANKS!
    I try to translate this almost drive me crazy!, 4 hours without results! XD

  29. Thanks for sharing help I am really worried about to customize my comment box for commenting.You really done a great job for me

    • Hi Jessica,

      I have took a look the forum post 🙂

      Did you try to clean your browser cache after changing it? Do you use any cache plugin in your wordpress site? If yes, disable or clean the cache to see the changes. I reckon after changing sometimes, it doesn’t show me the change unless I login to my dashboard and view my site as admin. And because I use w3 total cache, I often click “Empty all cache” to see the change as well.

      I guess none can help you in wordpress forum, because the theme you are using isn’t from wordpress team, but from a theme developer. Which means if you have problem you should go to theme site as she/he who develops the theme knows better.

      Here is the quick link of the freedream developer site: http://dreamgratuit.canalblog.com/archives/2009/11/17/15836058.html

      I hope this helps

      Kind regards

      Kimi.

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