Comments and post dates not showing up correctly on "posts page"

Question

I have customized the Twenty Fourteen theme to use the page "news" for my posts page because I have static frontpage.

When you view my news page, comments don't show up, even though they are enabled, and when you go to the specific post, they are. Is there any way to add the comments to the news page, where the posts are supposed to show up in full form?

I also can't get the date of the post to show up in either place and I can't figure out why.

Answer 1

Try editing category.php – or category-news.php if you have it – your CSS seems to indicate you've created a "news" category, but you'll hopefully know which files you've edited - and adding:

$withcomments = 1;

// If comments are open or we have at least one comment, load up the comment template.
if ( comments_open() || get_comments_number() ) {
    comments_template();
}

between get_template_part('content', get_post_format() ); and the endwhile (in the bit where WordPress loops through each post.)

This will add a comments form after every post on a category page (if you have loads of posts, especially short ones, you may find it much too cluttered, though.)

As for the date, the Twenty Fourteen theme has a function called twentyfourteen_posted_on() (it's in the template-tags.php file) - it prints the date and the author.

As you'll see if you inspect how it works, you can add:

echo esc_html( get_the_date() );

to print the date by itself, and get_the_date() takes a parameter that lets you customise how the date (and/or time) is displayed using the standard PHP date format.

You may also find the Template Hierarchy useful - it explains which template files WordPress loads to display different pages.