I’m not sure if this happened after an upgrade or something, but I logged in to WordPress this morning and found that ALL comments on the blog had disappeared! No approved… no pending… no spam. I knew that couldn’t be right, so I did some research and found this post on the WordPress Support forums:

Been using WordPress for years without hitch. I recently however upgraded to 2.9.1 and nobody can now post comments. If I try to post a comment, the page goes blank (on this url http://eastlower.co.uk/wp-comments-post.php#comment-)

Worse, all my previous comments from 606 posts appear to have disappeared (at least it says they have on the dashboard).

I’ve contacted my administrator who says my database in phpmyadmin is fine – though the comments table says ‘in use’.

I logged into phpMyAdmin and sure enough, the comments table says “in use.” I scrolled down a little farther and this comment seemed promising:

In Cpanel click on MySql Databases. On the next page you should see your MySql DBs. click on the “repair” button for the db you are using for your site. Hope it helps. Worked for me and I had the same problem.

I had some trouble finding this “repair” button and once I found it, I thought I would do a little step by step for others that had problems. This is using phpMyAdmin version 3.4.5.

Step 1: Log into your cPanel (located on your server, separate from WordPress) and then log into phpMyAdmin. Click on your WordPress database. BACK UP YOUR DATABASE BEFORE GOING ANY FURTHER.

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Step 2: In the list of tables, locate wp_comments and click the check box next to it.

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Step 3: Scroll down and choose “Repair Table” from the drop down box.

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Step 4: Success! It’s been repaired successfully.

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And now all my comments are back, even those lovely spam comments 😀

See, that wasn’t too hard! Hopefully that helps you!

I’m really interested and curious to find out how other people come up with their themes for WordPress. Although I really love the blogging tool, my one complaint has been how hard it is for people like me, who aren’t that familiar with PHP, to successfully get in and create their own themes. There are some guides out there for people like me, but unfortunately I find a lot of them hard to understand and not too user friendly.

Normally I’ll begin in Photoshop and do a mock up of what I’d like my final theme to look like, including link colors, text colors, and etc. Then I’ll go and try to find an existing theme (usually from my collection) that will fit this idea. I then tweak the CSS and code around to get the theme to work, and I always give credit to the original creator of the original theme. Sometimes the theme works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Lately I’ve been contemplating building a theme from the ground up, without borrowing code from other themes, and it’s a little daunting. How do I start? Should I just build a page without WordPress in mind using CSS, and then try to fit WordPress into it afterwards? Should I try to build my theme around WordPress functions I know that I want to use?

Other things I try to do when envisioning a new theme is to check out the websites of my esteemed peers. 😀 Websites like beccary.com, tehsheriff.org, pure-essence.net, bubblessoc.net (even though it’s down at the moment), and veerle.duoh.com are all created with that clean, sophisticated, and elegant style that I love. There aren’t too many elements distracting you, all are very simple and clean and all of the elements match well and work well together.

How do you go about creating your themes? What is your process?