Quick Tip: Disable Comments Programmatically

If you're an experienced WordPress Developer, then skip down to the code.

I’ve been working on small site that’s serving as a digital storefront for a company. The requirements have called for the homepage to feature a variety of featured projects, a news feed, and similar features all of which are obviously custom queries.

There’s a unique feature to this particular project around the newsfeed that’s a bit atypical for other blogs. That is, the project calls for comments and pings to be disabled.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, here’s a quick tip for how you can disable comments programmatically and how you can disable pings programmatically.

WordPress stores settings for comments and pings in two options:

1. default_comment_status
2. default_ping_status

To disable these options, all that’s really required is that you set them equal to an empty string:

• update_option( 'default_comment_status', '' );
• update_option( 'default_ping_status', '' );

Of course, there’s more to it than that. Assuming that you’re working on a theme for this, you’d want to wire this up to a specific hook and only do so after the theme as been activated.

Disable Comments Programmatically

From a high-level, this is how I organize my function:

• I want to fire a function after the theme has been setup. The after_setup_theme works for this.
• I only want to change the option if it has been enabled.

function example_disable_all_comments_and_pings() {

	// Turn off comments
	if( '' != get_option( 'default_ping_status' ) ) {
		update_option( 'default_ping_status', '' );
	} // end if

	// Turn off pings
	if( '' != get_option( 'default_comment_status' ) ) {
		update_option( 'default_comment_status', '' );
	} // end if

} // end example_disable_all_comments_and_pings
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'example_disable_all_comments_and_pings' );

Simple enough, isn’t it?

Of course, if you want to disable comments and pings for existing posts, that’s another post.