The Morning After – Separated Pingbacks?

The blogosphere has seen 3 major trends for comment styling during the last year. One trend was to highlight the blog author’s comments, the second was to give the comment author the possibility to present himself with a globally recognized avatar and the third trend was to separate the trackbacks/pingbacks from the real comments.
Unfortunately, all of these trends are not included in a plain-vanilla install of Arun Kale’s great THE MORNING AFTER theme. But there is nothing to worry about. Here is the tutorial for being „trendy“.

Back-up your old comments.php

• Go to WP Dashboard > Design > Theme Editor > comments.php
• Mark all and copy&paste it into a txt file.
• Save the txt file.

Get the new comments template

• Save this comments.txt on your computer. NOTE! Don’t overwrite the back-up!
• Open the downloaded txt file with your text editor and mark the whole content.
• Then, you copy this content and paste it under WP Dashboard > Design > Theme Editor > comments.php. Press Upload file. NOTE! This will delete all changes you have already made to your comments.php.
• Now, the trackbacks are excluded from the normal comment loop:

• And the trackbacks will appear below the normal comments when trackbacks ≥1:

(Re-)Activate highlighted comments and gravatars

• For enabling highlighted comments and gravatars, please follow the linked tutorials.
• If you already have performed those tutorials, you just have to redo those steps that affect the comments.php

WordPress Pastebin

• If of you are curious about the exact changes in the comments template, please visit the pastebin for WordPress.

Giving credit

• I cannot write this tutorial without giving credit to Andrew Schmitt – an active contributor to the TMA community.
• The separation of trackbacks and comments is based on his work.