I figured it out. Instead of trying to combine the two functions together in my functions.php file, I added both of them. Why did this work? Because one is adding a new comment (via a call to ajax-comments.php) and the other function is querying all the existing comments. So it’s something like this:
- My original
html5blankcomments()
function grabbed the existing WP comments. - the
misha_submit_ajax_comment()
function (that you can see in the tutorial link I posted in my question) talks to the ajax-comments.php file and just works on submitting (and displaying) the new comment. - With both functions running, we get the old comments (
html5blankcomments()
) and the new commentsmisha_submit_ajax_comment()
showing up without page refresh.
Because they both need to exist, combining them was not the answer. I thought it could all happen in one function (and perhaps it can), but that was not how the tutorial code was written.