A comment form is a great tool – it allows your readers to interact with your authors and vice versa. Engagement is significant for any website; such a direct line of communication should be fostered with care.<\/p>\n
In this short article, we’ll look at some of the options we have for bending the comment form to our will.<\/p>\n
WordPress has a single function for outputting the contact form: It is most commonly called from the There are three basic things we can do to customize our comment form. We can add our styling, we can modify the arguments passed to the generating function to alter its behavior or we can use plugins. We’ll mainly be focusing on the first two here.<\/p>\n There are two approaches you can take. If you’re building a theme from scratch, you can add the necessary CSS to your existing stylesheet. If you would like to modify a current theme, you should create a child theme<\/a>.<\/p>\n Of course, how you style your comment form is up to you. However, since forms are generated using the same function, their HTML output is roughly the same. Using the arguments we will discuss shortly, you may add and remove elements, but other than that, the classes and IDs are usually the same. Here’s how the HTML for the default comment form in Twenty Fourteen looks:<\/p>\ncomment_form()<\/code>. It accepts a (rather lengthy) array as its first argument, which allows you to specify everything from the labels to the notice below the comment box.<\/p>\ncomments.php<\/code> template file. In Twenty Fourteen and other default WordPress themes, this is the favored approach, and I suggest you do the same.<\/p>\ncomments.php<\/code> itself is usually called from the single post template, single.php<\/code>. It is called via the comments_template()<\/code> function, take a look at the default themes to follow along.<\/p>\nCustomizing The Form<\/h2>\n
Styling The Form<\/h3>\n