Manually Install Facebook Comments In WordPress


Although Facebook Comments launched in 2011 it wasn’t until recently that I decided to implement the comment system into my blog. There were several reasons why I didn’t pull the trigger on the new comment system when it launched, but the primary reason was simply because there was no out-of-the-box method to export all the comments from my then-comment system to Facebook Comments. However, after kicking around the pros and cons for a bit, I took the plunge and installed Facebook Comments since it will reduce the number of trolls, silence the anonymous commenters, and help facilitate higher quality conversations. That being said, here’s to a fresh start!

Okay, so in this tutorial I’m going to explain how to manually implement Facebook Comments for those of you who choose not to install a plugin or unable to install a plugin due to an old WordPress version you might be running. Let’s get started.
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Adding space between reCAPTCHA and the comment Submit Button on WordPress

When I embedded reCAPTCHA into my WordPress blog the first thing I noticed was that reCAPTCHA was sitting directly on top of the “Submit Comment” button without allowing any breathing room between the two. The appearance was rather obtrusive so I decided to do a quick search for a solution using my buddy, “Google.” Normally I would muck around with the code myself and call it a day, but I figured there was someone who already found a fix and shared it with the rest of us. As it turns out, there are many forum discussions about this same exact issue and several on the WordPress forum, yet no solutions were ever posted.

So, after wasting a few minutes searching for a solution, I decided to look through the code so I could figure out how reCAPTCHA was embedded into the comment section of the blog and attempt to correct its placement. My first instinct was to add a simple “break (<br/>)” tag in the comments.php file, above the “Submit Comment” button code, so this way it would add some space. However, this edit was unsuccessful and I quickly realized the only way to make this work was by combing the reCAPTCHA PHP file and looking for the correct section in the code to add a “<br/>” tag. After I opened the reCAPTCHA PHP file it did not take more than a minute to figure out which section needed the “<br/>.”

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