Separate WordPress Comments and Trackbacks

With all the WordPress themes available to WordPress users, it always surprises me how these incredible theme authors don’t take a few extra seconds to separate their theme’s trackbacks from the comments. It doesn’t look very professional and it can make it extremely difficult to follow a conversation in the comments.

Separating your trackbacks and comments requires a minimal amount of coding work to set up. First, you’ll want to make a backup of your comments.php file just in case something goes wrong. Next, follow these three steps:

1 ) Access your comments.php file and locate the following code:

< ?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ? >

Immediately after the above code, you’ll want to place this code:

< ?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ? >
< ?php if($comment_type == 'comment') { ? >

2 ) Next, you’ll want to scroll down a little bit and locate the following code:

< ?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ? >

Immediately before the above code, you’ll want to place this code:

< ?php } /* End of is_comment statement */ ? >

This will filter out all of the trackbacks and pingbacks from your main comments loop. Now we need to create a second comments loop to display the trackbacks and pingbacks.

3 ) Almost immediately below the code from step 2 you should find this code:

< ?php else : // this is displayed if there are no comments so far ? >

Immediately before the above code, you’ll want to place this code:

<>Trackbacks
<>
< ?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ? >
< ?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ? >
< ?php if($comment_type != 'comment') { ? >
<>< /li >
< ?php } ? >
< ?php endforeach; ? >
< /ol >

You can adjust this code to display how you want to, including using a different header if you have a specific look for your header 3.

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