Any WordPress / PHP pros out there? … strange problem I have with my theme/php code

Last night I had the privilege of approving my first comment on this blog. I run other blogs and have had other comments on those, but it’s always nice to get the first comment on a new blog. The comment came from the social media pro Mari Smith @marismith, who commented on my post about custom Facebook tabs.

I went in and approved the comment, but when I refreshed the actual post page, the entire sidebar disappeared. The whole blue section over there ————>>>> that contains my ads, categories, tags, etc…. all gone, just white space. Also missing was the entire footer.  All of the other posts were fine, it was just the post with an approved comment. The page simply stopped right were the comment was suppose to be.

After looking through the source code of an intact post and then comparing the source code of the broken page, I found the problem was occurring right were the date of the comment should be inserted with PHP code.

I went into my comments.php template and removed the following section of code: <?php comment_date(‘F jS, Y’) ?>. As soon as I did, the page worked again. From what I know about PHP, the code is correct. So I put the line of code back in the template and figured it was maybe something with the format characters. I changed a few and nothing worked, but as soon as I removed the “S”, everything worked fine. I know the “S” will display the 2 character suffix such as (st, nd, rd or th), but what I don’t know is why it’s causing my page template/theme to break.

So as of now I have the code: <?php comment_date(‘F j, Y’) ?>, without the “S” and everything is working. Are there any WordPress or PHP pros out there that have any idea on why this one formatting character would cause this problem?

I have a feeling it’s simply somthing to do with the coding in my theme, which I know is kind of an old theme, but I like it.

Thoughts?