First, I admit that only geeky WordPress designers like myself would find this amusing. It’s a small error in the WordPress default theme, Kubrick.

Here it is…

The paragraph tag is not closed correctly. If you have the Kubrick theme activated, on your password-protected post, the comments area will say, “This post is password protected. Enter the password to view comments.”

You can find that message in the Kubrick comments.php file as:

<p class=”nocomments”>This post is password protected. Enter the password to view comments.<p>

To close it correctly, it should be:

<p class=”nocomments”> </p>

I spotted this a long time ago while learning how to customize the comments template and thought that the WordPress people would fix it soon. Looks like they haven’t touched the comments.php file for a while, not even after WordPress had to update Kubrick for the 2.1 series.

I’m posting it now to reiterate the first rule in my WordPress tutorial series, which is close everything in the order that you open them.

While developing your own WordPress theme, you should validate all versions and templates of your theme, which should include the password-protected message. For a list of pages and template versions to validate, go to lesson number 16 of the tutorial series.