CUNY Academic Commons

The likely scenario here is a site admin was browsing through the "Appearance > Themes" list and the admin activated one of the CommentPress themes without having the CommentPress Core plugin activated.

• Network-disable the commentpress-default and commentpress-modern themes so these themes are no longer allowed to be shown in the "Appearance > Themes" screen since they only work with the commentpress-core plugin. (I've just done this, so no need to do it.)
• Remove the commentpress-theme and commentpress-modern themes from /wp-content/themes/. WordPress only stores the theme slug in the database, not the absolute path to the theme directory, so we should be safe. (I haven't done this yet. Wanted to get some confirmation before doing this.)

Sites that have either commentpress-theme or commentpress-modern should have the commentpress-core plugin already activated. It's not possible to activate just those themes without receiving a fatal error as evidenced in the last few tickets (#13715, #13656).

To be sure, I ran a WP-CLI command to see where both themes are active:

Sites where commentpress-modern is active:                 
+---------+---------------------------------------------+  
| blog_id | url                                         |  
+---------+---------------------------------------------+  
| 1603    | https://disswrkshpf13.commons.gc.cuny.edu/  |  
| 1682    | https://cunyfemtech.commons.gc.cuny.edu/    |  
| 1800    | https://sicelidas.commons.gc.cuny.edu/      |  
| 1921    | https://jk82.commons.gc.cuny.edu/           |  
| 2241    | https://techlitfrench.commons.gc.cuny.edu/  |  
| 2273    | https://jitpcomments.commons.gc.cuny.edu/   |  
| 2309    | https://fragments.commons.gc.cuny.edu/      |  
| 2314    | https://techniques.commons.gc.cuny.edu/     |  
| 2358    | https://wgs10016.commons.gc.cuny.edu/       |  
| 2748    | https://malswrites.commons.gc.cuny.edu/     |  
| 3944    | https://ivanhoetest.commons.gc.cuny.edu/    |  
| 4004    | https://tristengoodwin.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ |  
| 4332    | https://stefanomorello.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ |  
+---------+---------------------------------------------+ 

Sites where commentpress-theme is active:                      
+---------+--------------------------------------------------+ 
| blog_id | url                                              | 
+---------+--------------------------------------------------+ 
| 1063    | https://promockup2.commons.gc.cuny.edu/          | 
| 1271    | https://deathofthetermpaper.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ | 
| 1313    | https://amstprosemsp13.commons.gc.cuny.edu/      | 
| 1394    | https://thesocialpaper.commons.gc.cuny.edu/      | 
| 1491    | https://librarians.commons.gc.cuny.edu/          | 
| 1506    | https://eshtestcac.commons.gc.cuny.edu/          | 
+---------+--------------------------------------------------+

All sites have the commentpress-core plugin activated. (eshtestcac.commons.gc.cuny.edu has another unrelated error, but that site is marked as deleted so I'm not going to spend time debugging that site.)

One other thing I encountered is if a site has the commentpress-core plugin activated, the other bundled themes for CommentPress (commentpress-theme and commentpress-flat) are not visible under the "Appearance > Themes" screen. I've just added a commit that will allow these themes to be activated if the commentpress-core plugin is active: https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/1e1ef9c7da7f13b6e75574d6261280434bf018c3. This should properly solve #12573. I've also reported this issue to Christian (who maintains CommentPress) here.

Network-disable the commentpress-default and commentpress-modern themes so these themes are no longer allowed to be shown in the "Appearance > Themes" screen since they only work with the commentpress-core plugin. (I've just done this, so no need to do it.)

This sounds good to me.

Remove the commentpress-theme and commentpress-modern themes from /wp-content/themes/. WordPress only stores the theme slug in the database, not the absolute path to the theme directory, so we should be safe. (I haven't done this yet. Wanted to get some confirmation before doing this.)

This seems right to me too. Please go ahead with this step.

Thanks for identifying that related upstream issue!

I am so relieved!

Hi Boone -- can you clarify whether this means that no one will be able to use CommentPress going forward?

Got it. Thanks, Boone and Ray. Should we document this is some way so that people understand the order of what they have to do? Or can we trigger a warning to people who try to select the CP theme before activating the plugin? Apologies if you've already done this and I missed it

The changes we've made ensure that you won't even see the CommentPress themes in the list unless you have the CommentPress plugin activated. In other words, we are eliminating the possibility of the bad combination that caused the problems in related tickets. I don't think any further action is needed.

Okay. I do think we should document this, though. I've cc'ed Scott into the thread. Scott, can you please add something about this to our Help section?

Right, but then you won't even know about CommentPress as a possibility unless you see it in the plugin list. My suggestion for Scott to document this was to make sure that users knew about the possibilities CP offers and how to go about implementing it in the right way.

For the record - new documentation is available here - https://help.commons.gc.cuny.edu/commentpress/

Thanks so much, Scott!