LimeTouch

If you had ever receive a trackback or pingback, you would have noticed that they are lumped together with comments. There isn’t a way to separate them without actually doing some programming yourself. This is one of the mistakes of WordPress, grouping trackbacks, pingbacks and comments under the same entity. Hopefully this is one of the fixes they have lined up for 2.5.

It makes it extremely difficult for anyone to follow up on the conservations between the different commentators and sometimes with the author as well. Imagine yourself pacing through the comments when suddenly you are smacked with a barrage of trackbacks and pingbacks at different points.

I came across this excellent tutorial by Kyle Eslick which guides you on how to separate wordpress comments and trackbacks. The instructions are very concise and clear, you don’t need to be an expert in PHP coding to get by this tutorial. If you wish, you can also modify the code to separate pingbacks as well.

Now that you have separated trackbacks from comments, you want to be able to know the number of comments and trackbacks you are getting in each post. The WordPress function comments_number() only calculates the total number of comments, trackbacks and pingbacks. It doesn’t break it right down to the bare figures.

There is an impressive light weight plugin: Ping/Track/Comment Count by Mark Jaquith which calculates the total number of comments, pingbacks and trackbacks through the use of 2 very easy to use functions: comment_type_count() and get_comment_type_count(). Integrate the plugin in your blog, and with a little modification of your code, you would be able to accurately display your comments, pingbacks and trackbacks like what I have done here.

Should you require any help in using the plugin to suit your needs, feel free to post your questions here and I will do my best to help you.

Update: I stumbled upon an approach which does not require the use of plugins to solve this problem at Weblog Tools Collection.