How do we remove the H3 tag for the reply-title I.D

Question

We're doing some SEO tweaking to a site, and our SEO guru informs us that we need to remove the <h3> tags from the #reply-title element, output from line 1554 of comments-template.php. It's the header text for the comments form.

as seen here :

<?php if ( comments_open( $post_id ) ) : ?>
        <?php do_action( 'comment_form_before' ); ?>
        <div id="respond">
            <h3 id="reply-title"><?php comment_form_title( $args['title_reply'], $args['title_reply_to'] ); ?> <small><?php cancel_comment_reply_link( $args['cancel_reply_link'] ); ?></small></h3>
            <?php if ( get_option( 'comment_registration' ) && !is_user_logged_in() ) : ?>

We're aware of the numerous filters and hooks associated with the comment_form();, but that <h3> is hard-coded.

for this, we've been unable to come up w/ a sustainable solution to replacing the <h3 id="reply-title"></h3> with just <div id="reply-title"></div>.

it's starting to look like the quickest / easiest option may be to just unhook the call to comment_form(); and hook in a copy of our own function, which would be just a copy, with a simple change to that one line.

But in the meantime, it never hurts to poll the community. Any ideas on how to modify that markup in a sustainable ( non-core hackable ) way?

It should be noted that this can't be solved w/ some CSS or JS. The actual, crawlable DOM has to be dealt with.

thanks again stack.

Answer 1

Today there is a native option to do this without hacking the core, or doing tricky filters with output buffer. You just need to use the filter 'comment_form_defaults' and edit the values from 'title_reply_before' and 'title_reply_after' key:

add_filter( 'comment_form_defaults', 'custom_reply_title' );
function custom_reply_title( $defaults ){
  $defaults['title_reply_before'] = '<span id="reply-title" class="h4 comment-reply-title">';
  $defaults['title_reply_after'] = '</span>';
  return $defaults;
}

In this exemple, i have wrapped the title with a span tag that have no impact on SEO with a class named .h4, with a same style that the original h4 tag has:

h4, .h4 {
/* styles */
}

This way, you can keep the styling from a header without messing up with your SEO. (:

If you are using Bootstrap, this class already exists and are styled the same way i mentioned above to all headers. From H1 to H6 and the respective classes.

Answer 2

Had a similar problem, short blog entries found by google etc. showed the comment reply title instead of the blog entry content.

This solution buffers the comment form html and replaces the <h3 id="reply-title"..> with another tag before printing it:

function my_comment_form_before() {
    ob_start();
}
add_action( 'comment_form_before', 'my_comment_form_before' );

function my_comment_form_after() {
    $html = ob_get_clean();
    $html = preg_replace(
        '/<h3 id="reply-title"(.*)>(.*)<\/h3>/',
        '<p id="reply-title"\1>\2</p>',
        $html
    );
    echo $html;
}
add_action( 'comment_form_after', 'my_comment_form_after' );

Note: In older WordPress versions the html was <h3 id="reply-title">, since 3.6 or so it is <h3 id="reply-title" class="comment-reply-title">, both cases are covered in above code.

Answer 3

There isn't a way to change that particular <h3> element without hacking core (and you already know not to do that), but you still have the option of creating your own comments form or using a comment plugin that has the markup you want.

If you absolutely, positively don't want to use another method, you could capture the form's HTML output into a ridiculously long string, do a preg_replace on it to change the offending <h3>, then echo that stringified HTML form to the DOM.

Answer 4

Not exactly sure which text you are referring to but one of these may help or at least give you some idea:

add_filter( 'comment_author_says_text', 'sp_comment_author_says_text' );
function sp_comment_author_says_text() {
    return 'author says';
}


add_filter( 'comment_form_defaults', 'sp_comment_form_defaults' );
function sp_comment_form_defaults( $defaults ) {

    $defaults['title_reply'] = __( 'Leave a Comment' );
    return $defaults;

}

Source