Tutorial : How to separate Comments and Trackbacks

I’ve always felt that showing your comments and Trackbacks separated adds a bit of professionalism to your blog. It’s hard as it is to follow a long conversation, but also having to weed out the Trackbacks makes it even more difficult. I could never really understand why people don’t do this because honestly having those two separated takes only a minimal amount of coding effort and only 2 or 3 minutes of your time but has a great impact on your readers.
To get started, make sure you back-up your comments.php file before starting to edit anything.

1 ) Access your comments.php file and locate the following code:

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

Immediately after the above code, you’ll want to place this code:

<?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?> <?php if($comment_type == 'comment') { ?>

2) Next, you’ll want to scroll down a little bit and locate the following code:

<?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

Immediately before the above code, you’ll want to place this code:

<?php } /* End of is_comment statement */ ?>

This bit of code is used to filter out all of the tracbacks and the pingbacks from your main comments loop, meaning that we’re going to need a second loop that will display our trackbacks and pingbacks.

3 ) Almost immediately below the code from step 2 you should find this code:

<?php else : // this is displayed if there are no comments so far ?>

Immediately before the above code, you’ll want to place this code:

Trackbacks
<ol> <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?> <?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?> <?php if($comment_type != 'comment') { ?> <li><?php comment_author_link() ?></li> <?php } ?> <?php endforeach; ?> </ol>

This is the code using an ordered list ( ol ) to display the latest trackbacks and pingbacks - you can style it accordingly to match your theme’s design.