I added a basic “favorite/recommend” functionality for posts and comments to a wordpress site I’m working on.
I’m storing the total numbers of comment “likes” in a custom comment meta field (update_comment_meta). Now I would like to query and sort comments based on this custom meta key and the corresponding values in order to display popular comments.
Ideally I would like to be able to use parameters like “meta_key” and “order_by=meta_value_num” similar to WP_Query, but apparently comment queries don’t support those.
Do I have to use a custom written query to the database? If so, could anybody give me an initial push as to how to approach this?
Unfortunately it’s unsupported by the applicable WordPress functions for querying comments, which is primarily due to(i feel) not enough people(or anyone) yet asking for it.
I want to highlight a couple of core files here to help understand the issue.
First up comments-template.php, the
comment_templatefunction, it’s this function that queries for comments and then adds them to theWP_Queryobject.Next up comments.php and the
get_commentsfunction, this time you’ll find no support for custom sorts, eg. meta sorting.array_intersectlooks for matches only, if it’s not in that array of values you see there then it’s not considered a valid order.There is one filter in the comment template function though that will pass on the whole array of comments called
comments_array(you’ll see that hook in the first file i linked to on line 892).You could loop over the array of comments that have been fetched and build a new array that’s sorted based on your meta data(though you’d probably need a custom query to go fetch the meta data if you want to be as efficient as possible).
I can add an example of array juggling later if you need one.