Added some custom coding to v3.0.9 to display number of comments in NewsPack-Blocks homepage article title blocks

[cfkerchner]

Hello:

I'm new to all things at GitHub. I'm an 80 year old retired electrical engineer. My first time here to your discussion forum.

I've been helping on a volunteer basis for a small new-media type online newspaper that's been using the NewsPack Theme for many years in updating and resolving some issues in her site.

A security hole in NewsPack-Blocks v1.13.2 the owner was for a long time just ignoring necessitated per my suggestions that the owner update to v3.0.9, which was the recommended compatible version for the rest of her site's theme which is NewsPack-Scott. Anyway, when we did the update to v3.0.9 she lost some custom features that someone long ago made to v1.13.2 to add to the home page articles title block display, i.e., the number of comments made for each homepage article.

In searching online for an off the shelf solution, before taking a do it one's self approach I have seen quite a few people asking how to implement this feature to this NewsPack-Blocks plugin. I could not find one.

Anyway, doing some digging into the old patched v1.13.2 version of the plugin and comparing the code to the original mint copy of v1.13.2 which I got here from GitHub, I figured out after some self tutoring in PHP what exactly that "someone" did to the mint v1.13.2 several years ago in the newspaper's site. And I then figured out how to patch that code into the relevant file in v3.0.9 to accomplish the same display of the number of comments made for the home various articles. Probably easy-peezy for PHP pros here. But I'm not a software engineer and nor was I very knowledgeable about WordPress database structure, so I had to learn as I went. LOL

And thus with solving the task for that small newspaper site, I came by here as a GitHub newbie and am offering to share this lesson learned for the non-PHP experts out there with anyone who is using NewsPack-Blocks v3.0.9 and desires to add showing the comments count number in the title block for each article in their WordPress site homepage. All one would have to do is contact me. I don't know the process to do that here within this GitHub discussion forum, but if anyone contacts me via my private email address of "cfkerchner [at sign] kerchner.com", I'd be happy to share the solution that worked for me.

So again, I'd be happy to share what I learned and did to help the owner of the 15 year old small new-media online newspaper to get the feature back she missed having after updating from v1.13.2 to v3.0.9 to resolve the security threat issue that is in v1.13.2 and up to and including v3.0.8, I believe. Also, if this desired and asked for feature by some WordPress users of NewsPack-Blocks v3.0.9 has been solved before via some other person or persons here at GitHub, share with me a link to that solution. Because, when I was looking as a newbie to GitHub, I was unable to find an off the shelf solution.

Sincerely,

Charles Kerchner, P.E. Retired
Lehigh Valley PA USA