WordPress hacking: more comments in your feeds
Unless you’re the Tolstoy of blogging — Does that even make sense? It’s like being the Gandhi of boxing — you’re probably not writing thirty WordPress posts a day. At my rate — the Def Leppard of blogging — I’m lucky to produce thirty a year (not counting my posts under the pen name “Arianna Huffington”). However, it is possible for one post to receive thirty comments in one day, especially if it contains provocative statements, e.g., AppleScript, Die! Die! Die!
or Please leave your comments below.
(This is assuming that you allow comments. And that someone reads your blog. And that the someone is not an NSA agent.)
Unfortunately, WordPress uses the same limit on the number of items in a syndicated feed for both the main post feed of the blog and for the comments feed of an individual post. By default, that limit is 10 items. Thus, if you try to follow an active comments thread on a post via the feed, you’re likely to miss comments (unless you’re one of the scourges of the internet who have their feed readers set to check for new articles every two minutes). It completely defeats the purpose of subscribing to the comments feed if you can’t track the comments with the feed. As a solution, you could raise the overall WordPress item limit, for both posts and comments, but this may increase the bandwidth of your web site significantly, enormously if you’re one of the angels of the internet who put the full text of their posts in the feed.
Fellow blogger Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software has filed a feature request for a separate limit on comments feeds. However, you don’t need to wait until WordPress 2.7 for this request to be implemented, because you can implement it now by hacking your own WordPress installation. With Daniel’s help, I was able to get this to work in WordPress 2.5.1. You just need to modify one file, wp-includes/query.php. The ending of line 1380 in query.php is currently
DESC LIMIT " . get_option('posts_per_rss'));
You need to modify it as below, replacing 100 with your desired item limit for comments feeds.
DESC LIMIT 100");
You also need to modify the ending of line 1437, replacing
DESC LIMIT " . get_option('posts_per_rss');
with
DESC LIMIT 100";
That’s all there is to it! My usual disclaimers apply here: I take no responsibility for breaking anything of yours, for breaking anything of anyone else’s, or indeed for anything that happens in the universe. I do offer this guarantee: if my hack doesn’t work for you, I’ll gladly refund my consulting fee.
Please leave your comments below. AppleScript, Die! Die! Die!