I’ve been working with the Facebook Comment integration into WordPress lately. Mostly because it can help cut down on spam, but also because of the grammer checker and social media benefit. I couldn’t really find a good solution online for pulling the number of comments on any given post, so here is what I ended up with. I included this in my functions.php file, and just put this: <?php get_fb_comment_count(); ?> in my single.php file where I want the comment number to be displayed.

function get_fb_comment_count() {
     global $post;
     $url = get_permalink($post->ID);
     $filecontent = file_get_contents('https://graph.facebook.com/?ids=' . $url);
     $json = json_decode($filecontent);
     $count = $json->$url->comments;
     if ($count == 0 || !isset($count)) {
          $count = 'No Comments';
     } elseif ( $count == 1 ) {
          $count = '1 Comment';
     } else {
          $count .= ' Comments';
     }
     echo $count;
}

I often run into situations where I am editing a site, or checking my pages, but do not want to count the time i spend on my own site to count towards my Analytics Tracking.

A common issue many beginner WordPress users run into is blocking certain content from users that aren’t registered or logged in. Here is a short, simple solution in the form of a shortcode.

I spend a lot of time coding. a lot. So much so, that when I write posts and pages on my WordPress sites and go to save it, I hit Ctrl+S (Cmd+S on Mac), which is the short-key to save in pretty much any program ever made. It can get frustrating to save and have to stop, exit out of the popup window trying to save the website locally, and then hit the Update button. So, this snippet covers how to detect when a page is loaded, output scripts, see when a user presses multiple buttons across operating systems, stop the default reaction from the browser, and finally activate a button.

Web browsers store a lot of information about how you navigate the internet, and one of those metrics is called a referrer. A referrer is the page that you were on before the page you are currently on. By checking this browser option we can eliminate quite a few of our spammy comments from bots that crawl the internet and post links to certain ‘medical solutions’.  Bellow is another WordPress PHP Snippet that you can post into your functions.php and will check whether a referrer exists or not.