WordPress Comments on Episode Pages

Benecaster supports WordPress’s native comment system on episode pages. Comments are off by default at the show level — you turn them on per show in Feed Settings, and the rest (comment forms, moderation, notifications) works exactly as WordPress normally handles comments.

Enabling Comments

Go to Show → Settings → Feeds and turn on Enable WordPress comments on episode pages.

Once enabled:

• A comment form appears at the bottom of each episode’s WordPress page
• The Discussion metabox appears in the episode editor, letting you enable or disable comments on individual episodes
• WordPress sends comment notification emails to the site admin as usual
• All standard WordPress moderation tools apply

Comments are per-show. If you have multiple shows, you toggle comments independently for each one.

How the Per-Show Toggle Works

The toggle controls whether comments are open or closed on episode pages for that show. It uses WordPress’s built-in comment status, so your theme renders the comment section automatically — no shortcodes or template changes required.

When the toggle is off, episode pages fall back to your site-wide comment setting in Settings → Discussion. If your site has comments enabled globally, turning the per-show toggle off will close comments for that show without affecting other post types.

When the toggle is on, episode pages follow WordPress’s normal per-post Discussion metabox settings — you can still close comments on specific episodes from within the episode editor.

Comments Are Hidden, Not Deleted

If you disable comments on a show after visitors have already left comments, those comments are hidden, not deleted. They remain in your WordPress database. Re-enabling the toggle restores them — they reappear on the episode pages immediately.

To permanently delete comments, use WordPress’s standard comment moderation screen (Comments in the admin menu).

Theme Compatibility

Benecaster uses a PHP-layer filter to gate comment status per show. It does not call remove_post_type_support() — that would disable comments site-wide, which would affect all shows at once. Instead, the per-show gate closes comments at the template-resolution level for the affected show.

When comments are disabled for a show, Benecaster substitutes an empty template (templates/episode/comments-off.php) in place of your theme’s comments.php. This means no comment section is rendered at all — not even the “Comments are closed” message that some themes show by default.

Theme authors: If you want to customize the “comments are off” state (for example, to show a branded message instead of nothing), you can override the template by creating a file at {your-theme}/benecaster/episode/comments-off.php. Any content in that file will render in place of the empty default.

Errata vs. Comments

Benecaster has two ways for listeners to engage with episode content after publication:

The two features are independent — you can use either, both, or neither.