Comments not appearing since upgrading to WordPress 5.5

Hello. I have the same.
I have exactly the same problem after updating. On a standard topic, comments work. On the topic “Mantra” no.
There is another site on the topic “Nirvana” – everything works there.

Same issue here as well, after the 5.5 update the comments are disabled when you break comments into pages with however many top level comments per page.

Cannot simply disable breaking comments into pages as that slows down any page/post with a plethora of comments. Can someone please help?

Yes, same here. The submit comment box is present and the comments total but existing comments are not displayed. I disabled all related plugins and it made no difference.

Currently Mantra is updated to support WP 5.2

For Free themes, this is the way. Zed should check in soon. Don’t think they’re full-time at this so it may be a few days. I’m looking at moving to a more recent and supported theme as they’ve not fixed the bugs from the last update Mantra yet.

I have this problem too. The fix suggested by Rufus did not work for me — so I ended up simply rolling back to WordPress 5.4.2 and restoring the database from before the upgrade. I’m hoping this will be corrected soon.

For me, Mantra had several bugs that had not been addressed. This was the kicker. It’s become an old theme, not well integrated with modern WordPress. Why keep trying to patch and work-around?

I’ve migrated to Esotera with the Arcanum child theme. I was easily able to restore the general flow of the site but with a refreshed look. The bugs are gone, there’s new features and more customizations, it’s integrated with WordPress Customizer, and theres a Plus upgrade for more features.

A few things I plan to tweak but am pleased with the result. Am also pleased with Cryout. Looked at another makers theme that was highly recommended. It had a couple of cool features but was full of bugs and missing customizations.

Just thought I would share — I have modified the mantra/includes/theme-comments.php file, but I did it slightly differently than @Rufus suggested. I used the equivalent template of the Kahuna theme as a model — this can be found here –
https://themes.svn.wordpress.org/kahuna/1.6.1.1/includes/comments.php – I just chose that one because it is the most recently updated free Cryout theme.

So now my Mantra template contains this switch statement:

function mantra_comment( $comment, $args, $depth ) {
	$GLOBALS['comment'] = $comment;
	switch ( $comment->comment_type ) :
		case 'pingback'  :
		case 'trackback' :
		?>
			<li class="post pingback">
			<p><?php _e( 'Pingback: ', 'mantra' ); ?><?php comment_author_link(); ?><?php edit_comment_link( __('(Edit)', 'mantra'), ' ' ); ?></p>
		<?php
		break;
		case '' :
		default :
	?>

The pingback/trackback switch statements were at lines 55-60 of the original Mantra template. I moved them to the beginning of the switch statement following the Kahuna example, and also because I just thought it would be cleaner to have the default spec at the end.

The main difference with my solution is that I am using “default” rather than “case ‘comment'”. Probably doesn’t matter … just a matter of coding preference.

Do you have FTP access? You can edit directly through the theme editor in WordPress– I prefer using SFTP for edits simply because it makes it easier for me to make a backup copy of the original file.

I think that a functions.php modification would be preferable, but I personally wasn’t sure how to write one. Given that the Mantra theme hasn’t been updated since May 2019, there’s probably no downside to editing the theme file itself. (I’m sure that if and when a theme update is pushed out, it will address this issue).

If you are not comfortable editing the theme files, you might want to just wait for an upgrade. I contacted the theme developer via the comments form, and have received this response:

Thank you informing us of this issue. We will release an update for Mantra as soon as possible to address it.

They didn’t specify a date, but the changes I made were based on something they already have in another theme, so I don’t think it will take them long.

If you do want to make changes, I would suggest you follow the instructions that @Rufus provided in post-106488, and simply add this line immediately after line 22. (So it would be a new line #23).
case 'comment' :

You’ll find the theme-comments.php template under the “includes” section of the theme editor.

Thank you for this clarification, @Zed.

@Parre –I have downloaded the zip file update, and verified that it incorporates the same change to the theme-comments.php file that I made — so following the instructions that @Zed gave for upgrading the theme should work for you.

The official Mantra 3.3.0 update released this week includes the fix for the missing comments issue.
Thank you all for suggesting corrections and for the patience.

@btmz.nitin, I think you’d better ask the theme’s authors about this. It may due to the same WordPress change (I mentioned earlier here).

Just to update this discussion, I upgraded to WP 5.8.1 this morning, but I had noticed this problem for a while. After the upgrade, the comments were still not being displayed. I applied the change Rufus suggested on August 13, 2020, and the problem is now fixed!

Thank you, Rufus!