Count parent comments & replies separately?

here’s a quick and dirty method…

in functions php, we create a callback function for wp_list_comments() which will count our comments:

$GLOBALS['parent_comments_count'] = 0;
$GLOBALS['child_comments_count'] = 0;

function count_comments( $comment, $args, $depth ) {
    $GLOBALS['comment'] = $comment;
    if($comment->comment_parent==0):
        $GLOBALS['parent_comments_count']++;
    else:
        $GLOBALS['child_comments_count']++;
    endif;
}

then, in our template where it calls wp_list_comments(), we add another with a callback to our count function, then immediately after we can echo our count. then we have the regular wp_list_comments(), which will actually output the comments:

wp_list_comments( array( 'callback' => 'count_comments' ) );
echo "parents: ". $GLOBALS['parent_comments_count'];
echo "children: ". $GLOBALS['child_comments_count'];
wp_list_comments();

emphasis on ‘dirty’, I’m sure there’s a cleaner way to do this.

Here’s another method which uses an additional query. This will get numbers regardless of pagination. We use the comment_count variable in $post to subtract number of parents from to get number of children.

In functions.php:

function c_parent_comment_counter($id){
    global $wpdb;
    $query = "SELECT COUNT(comment_post_id) AS count FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE `comment_approved` = 1 AND `comment_post_ID` = $id AND `comment_parent` = 0";
    $parents = $wpdb->get_row($query);
    return $parents->count;
}

In the template:

<?php
$number_of_parents = c_parent_comment_counter($post->ID);
$number_of_children = $post->comment_count - $number_of_parents;

echo "parents: ".$number_of_parents;
echo "children: ".$number_of_children;

?>

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