Magazeen WordPress theme and the return of the incorrect comment date issue

This site runs off of the free Magazeen theme created by the folks over at Smashing Magazine.

I’ve modified it quite a bit from the default, but I really like it as a starting template.

The problem I ran into right away was the annoying “comment date bug”. It became obvious fairly quickly that when someone left a comment, the comment was listed as having been left on the date of the post, instead of the actual date.

So even if the comment(s) came a month later, it would look like all the comments were left on the same day the post was created. Not a showstopper, but very annoying.

After a bit of Google-wrangling, I found the answer buried in the comments thread of the initial announcement post on Smashing Magazine.

Right now there’s over 500 comments on that post, so I thought I’d provide the answer here in case anyone does some Googling, maybe they can spare themselves the ordeal of sifting through 500 comments.

Anyway, on with the fix:

1. open “functions.php” of your Magazeen theme

2. Search for this string (should be around line 46):

<?php the_time( ‘l j, Y’ ) ?>

and change it to this:

<?php comment_date(‘M j, Y’) ?>

After that you should be all done. The fix was provided by a commenter named ‘div’ on the Magazeen comment thread. There were also apparently a lot of issues with the top thumbnails carousel, but luckily I didn’t experience those myself.

I applied this fix once, but I think when I updated to 3.0 it got overwritten. Shoulda used a child theme I guess. Anyway all’s well that ends well.