As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m going to be turning off pingbacks for the public-facing side of this blog for a number of reasons the least of which is not to help make it easier for others to participate in comments.

In order to do that, I’ve written a small plugin that helps makes this really easy to do:

  1. Download the plugin
  2. Install and activate it
  3. And you’ll be good to go

Sound simple, right? Here’s more information.

Remove WordPress Pingbacks

Remove WordPress Pingbacks

You can grab a copy of the plugin on GitHub – the README includes everything that you need to know about how it works.

The short of it is this:

This class will remove the count and listing of public-facing pingbacks from your WordPress blog; however, if your blog or website renders a heading element for the ‘Trackbacks’ and/or ‘Pings’ heading, then you can use the bundled CSS to hide them.

To be clear, this means that on any post that has trackbacks or pings, the count will no longer contribute to the total number of comments per post. Additionally, they will not be rendered in the comment feed of the blog.

Because each site is different, some blogs separate trackbacks and pings into a separate section that allows them to have the same heading; others don’t. For that very reason, I’ve included a CSS file that you can use to edit to remove that particular heading from the display of your site.

Over time, I plan to make improvements so that element doesn’t actually exist in the DOM.

Anyway, this is but 1.0.0 of the plugin so feel free to download it, offer feedback, open issues, or even initial pull requests. I know that based on how others have been talking over the past few weeks, this is something that some have been looking to do, but haven’t wanted to disable them in the dashboard.

This plugin seeks to make that possible.