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How Not to Brag About Zero Comments
By Robert Campbell on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
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So you just wrote a new post on your WordPress Blog, and it has a whopping zero comments so far. Like bragging about it? I don’t. I also don’t like search engines like Google caching 10 counts of the word comment. If there are no comments, I say, why brag about it. Fortunately, WordPress lets you easily customize this in your templates.
Comment Template Tag
The comment template tag used in your WordPress site appears something like this: comments_popup_link(‘0 Comments, ‘1 Comment’, ‘% Comments’)
There are actually five parameters for this tag. The first is what to display when there are zero comments, the second is if there is one comment, and the third is what to say if there is more than one comment. The last two parameters are to identify what CSS class it is, and to display if comments are even allowed. The percentage character needs to be left in there. It indicates the number of comments.
For this sites home page I use: comments_popup_link(‘‘, ‘1 Comment’, ‘% Comments’) to display comment count on the home page. Zero comments on the post? You get zero notification because I leave that parameter blank. See example below.
Getting Original
To spice up the actual posts pages, I try to give it a little flare to encourage comments. To edit yours, open the file single.php in your template folder, and look for the tag comment_number(). This works just like comment_popup_link() in regards to parameters. If you don’t find either one, you can always add it.
On my posts I use: comments_number(‘Be the first to comment!‘, ‘One comment so far. You are next!’, ‘% Comments – Post Yours’ )
It’s just a little spice to help encourage those comments.
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Category: Best Web Image, Blogging, Code, Wordpress Tags: comments, comment_number(), comment_popup_link(), Wordpress
Haha that’s a clever little way around the whole ‘nobody-wants-to-comment-on-my-posts’ problem!
On the other hand, do you think that because you’re not mentioning comments, people won’t realise that they CAN comment, so it might end up reducing the number of comments you get? I guess it would be a tricky thing to test.
Oh and I also noticed that this post didn’t have any comments, so here you go!
Thank you for the comment! The effect of not displaying comments only occurs on the home page. When on the post itself, there is encouragement. Comments can’t be made from the home page anyhow.
Ah yes I see what you mean. I think it definitely looks neater doing it this way. As Neamar said, I hate all those blogs that boast about their lack of comments!
I’m not all that familiar with the internal workings of WordPress, but maybe you could create some sort of extension to provide this functionality – I’m sure a lot of people would find it useful.
Definetely a good thing to know. I hate seeing those kind of “There is already 0 comments !”.
Good enough reason alone! Thanks for the comment.
I use this wordpress feature for quite some time now, it definitely allows for a better experience when looking at a blog. Especially if you want people to be attracted by some post, and the number of comments is (apart from a catchy title of course) one of the major factors here.
I like this web very much.
This is really a great web.
And it is not like other money orientated place, the information here is really important.
I am definitely bookmarking it as well as sharing it with my friends.