I had a big wave of comment spam repeatedly hit a new WordPress site I’m developing yesterday, so I decided to switch the site over to the Disqus comment system. The site’s theme utilizes the Nivo Slider on the home page to rotate pictures from featured posts. Unfortunately, I discovered this morning that enabling the Disqus WordPress plugin broke the Slider a bit. It added a fifth tab to the slider, which caused it to overflow, and only the word ‘undefined’ was shown. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix available.
Disqus appends additional information to the header of a post, so when it’s called by Nivo Slider it doesn’t know what to do with it. The simple solution is to change a setting in your WordPress Dashboard. Under Comments, find the link to Disqus or follow the Settings link under the Disqus plugin listed under Installed Plugins. Then click the Advanced Options in the top-right corner so you get a list of WordPress settings.
Scroll down a little bit under Configuration until you get to the Comment Counts part. Check the box that says “Output JavaScript in footer”, save the changes, and clear your cache. Your slideshow should now be working properly again.
If you look at the Note below Comment Counts, it even says to check the box “if you have problems with… broken featured image carousels”.
If everything were that easy!