bm trackPing – comments, trackbacks and pingbacks separated

A year and a bit ago I wrote a tutorial on splitting the comments, trackbacks and pingbacks up on your wordpress blogs. Then a few months ago Daniel from DailyBlogtips wrote a post on the same subject (a couple people even mentioned my post in the comments 🙂 ). I decided then a plugin was needed to do this.

The basics were easy but I was having issues calling the splitter function without user intervention, I like to make things as simple as possible and it just wasn’t working for me. Then, a couple of weeks ago, this post on weblogtoolscollection talked about a similar topic and I noticed the comments_array plugin hook, a hook I hadn’t seen before.

Once I knew what to do it only took me 5 minutes to put it all together (it’s easy when you know how) and I now have a finished working plugin. BM-trackPing.

The plugin is very easy to use, simply upload the plugin file, and activate it. Done.

What it does is grab all the trackbacks and pingbacks and add them to an unordered list in a brand new comment, removing the old comments along the way. This all happens at display time and modifies nothing in the database, meaning the site will work as normal if you disable the plugin.

The plugin also sets the comment type to bm-trackback which means that if you use the BM-comment-highlight plugin, you can target the comment class to style it differently as well. I use a variant of bm-trackPing over on Pro Theme Design and it seems to work a treat.