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Numbering Comments in WordPress

 Published: 1 year, 3 months ago (Jun 2, 2009) in How To's/Reviews
 Tags: wordpress ·  Print This Post ·  Leave a Comment

When modifying a WordPress theme’s comments section, developers may want to include a particular comment’s number in the flow of the other comments of a given post/page. For example, if you look at the meta section of any comment on this site, you’ll see that I’ve incorporated such a feature. Do I have a reason? No. I just had some free time, and wanted to waste a PHP call.

For those users who do have a reason to implement such a feature, here’s how:

1. Open comment-template.php (located directly under /wp-includes) and search for the start_el function. On a vanilla install of 2.7.1, the function begins around line 1200.
2. Add the following code to the beginning of the function:

global $comment_num;
if(isset($comment_num)) {
$comment_num++;
} else { $comment_num = 1; }

3. The beginning of your start_el function should now look something like the following:

function start_el(&$output, $comment, $depth, $args) {

global $comment_num;
if(isset($comment_num)) {
$comment_num++;
} else { $comment_num = 1; }
$depth++;
$GLOBALS['comment_depth'] = $depth;

4. Next, find the comments.php file for your theme (located in /wp-content/themes/your-theme/)
5. Add a call to the global $comment_num variable by adding the following code to the file:

global $comment_num;

6. Finally, select where in the code you would like for your comment number to appear and add this code:

echo $comment_num;

This method was developed by PannPann and kindly distributed through the WordPress.org support forums. Read through the read to find out how to modify the start_el function to support comment numbering for paged comments.

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