W3 Total Cache Self-induced Error

W3 Total Cache is one of the best plugins I’ve found for wordpress. Yet, at first glance it can seem overwhelming to setup. But, it’s not really all that hard.

Recently I’d moved this site from Drupal to WordPress which went pretty smooth except for a few small issues with the comments which I wrote about in a previous post.

During the process of fixing the out of order wordpress comments I introduced another problem.

While fixing the comments I had disabled W3 Total Cache. The problem cropped up when I went to access the comments after W3 was running once again.

While not paying attention while fixing the comments (nested comments set to 5) I had one comment that would have been nested at #6. Since WordPress was setup to only nest to 5 it simply did not place it where it should have been.

It just placed the post beneath the others and in order, no problem right? Well as I said it turned up only after W3 Total cache was running and you tried to manage the comments.

Most of the time you would just get a blank page and at other times you would get all the way to the edit comments page but there where no comments displayed. Yet, it would show that there where comments and pages.

What ended up happening was that the comment that could not be nested at position #6 ended up having the comment_parent set to the comment_id.

Why it created an issue with W3 Total cache I have no idea maybe someone will stop by and enlighten us. But, by changing the comment_parent back to 0 fixed the issue.