A few weeks ago, I switched my site’s design from the Carrington framework to Lucian Marin’s Journalist theme. While I liked the visual design of the Carrington framework, it includes many features I never used. These options, in part due to problems with my host, were slowing my site down considerably. In an attempt to reduce the errors my blog generated, I switched to the Journalist theme for its lightweight coding and clean, yet appealing, design.
Shortly after making the switch, I began to notice that trackbacks weren’t appearing on my posts. At first, I assumed that the ongoing problems with my host were to blame, but since these issues have been largely resolved, I began to wonder if something else was amiss. As I discovered yesterday, the Journalist theme does not include either the trackback RDF code or trackback URLs. With the addition of one line of code, however, trackbacks are once again appearing on my posts.
If you’ve noticed the same problem with your WordPress theme, adding <!-- <?php trackback_rdf(); ?> --> to your theme’s index.php, page.php, and single.php files (just before the <?php endforeach; else: ?> line) will solve the problem. I recommend adding a trackback link, using the <a rel="trackback" href="<?php trackback_url(); ?>"><?php trackback_url(); ?></a> code as well, to ensure compatibility with the widest variety of sites.