The Blog of Lisa Morosky

This is a guest post by Russ Henneberry.

The power of WordPress lies in its ability to rally an enormous community of selfless developers that add functionality to the core of the blogging platform by building plugins.

There is an infinite number of plugins available, providing nearly every function you would ever want your blog to perform.

The downside to plugins (of course) is that they can slow down the load time of your site. With the recent declaration by Google that load speed has an effect on your search engine rankings, this post topic seemed appropriate.

WP-DB Back-Up – If disaster strikes, this could be the most important plugin you have ever installed. The plugin will back up your WordPress MySQL database and email it to you automatically based on a schedule. If your database becomes corrupt, you will have a back-up.

WP Super Cache – Not only does this plugin not slow down your site load speed – it will speed it up by generating static HTML files and serving them up to your visitors instead of those clunky PHP scripted pages.

WP-Memory – This plugin places a statistics box in your admin panel that displays the amount of memory that your WordPress install is consuming. This statistics box should be consulted when you are considering adding fun plugins, like a Facebook Fan Box, that may eat up a lot of memory and slow down your load speed.

Russ Henneberry writes and speaks about content marketing and how tiny businesses can make mighty profits by using a personal computer, a little imagination, and a few well-placed dollars. You can receive the RSS feed for his daily blog here.

I told some people on Twitter that if I ever figured out how to do this, I’d write a post about it.

So when you install Disqus on your blog, everything is spectacular…until you look on your pages and see a big, glaring, yellow box with “Comments are closed on this post” (or whatever it says). It’s obnoxious, and it’s ugly, and no matter what you do, you can’t disable it.

Well, I hacked some PHP and found a solution.

1. Go to the “disqus.php” file (in the plugins folder).
2. Find this line in the file (CTRL+F):  if ( ! (is_single() || is_page() || $withcomments) ) {
3. Replace that line with this:  if ( ! (is_single()|| $withcomments) ) {
4. Save the file.

Voila. The annoying yellow box (and all Disqus content) is gone on all pages (because you deleted the || is_page() code). Of course, now I have the default WordPress “Comments on this entry are closed.” message there. But that’s far less annoying (in my opinion).

This leaves everything intact for posts, so you shouldn’t have any troubles there.

I don’t think this is a permanent solution. I think that Disqus is planning on addressing this issue in a future update. But for now, it gets the job done.