Check for Facebook comments in a post?

Question

How can I check if a post has Facebook comments on it and create a conditional statement? I'd like to show a small comments icon if any comments have been made.

Even better, anyone know how to get the comments count from it as well?

Thanks

Answer 1

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/

There's a tag you can include <fb:comments-count href=http://example.com/></fb:comments-count> which will echo the number of comments for that URL in your theme. So use something like:

<fb:comments-count href=<?php the_permalink ?>></fb:comments-count>

If you want to get the actual number without it just being echoed then you'd probably need to do some kind of client side scripting, eg with jQuery:

<span id="comment-count"><fb:comments-count href=<?php the_permalink ?>></fb:comments-count></span>

$(document).ready(function() {
    var count = $("#comment-count").html();
    if( count > 0 ) 
        $("#comment-count").html('<img src="comment-icon.png" alt="" />');
    else
         $("#comment-count").hide();
})

Above not tested in any way...

Or if you want to do it server side, which is almost certainly a better idea but will be more fiddly, then take a look at: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/comment/

Answer 2

There's a class that makes the count increment per comment. Use that within your loop with an if (!emtpy) conditional and style accordingly. See below:

The fb:comments-count tag will emit the number of comments on your URL in a <span> tag. You can then style this however appropriate to match your site. Note this is currently not available in HTML5. For example, to show the number of comments on example.com:.

<fb:comments-count href=http://example.com/></fb:comments-count> awesome comments 

Will emit:

47601 awesome comments

You can also load an iframe from Facebook which will display the number of comments with a link to your URL. For example, this shows the number of comments for example.com.

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/comments.php?href=example.com&permalink=1" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:130px; height:16px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe> 

The number of comments left on a particular URL can be accessed via the Graph API. For example, the number of comments on example.com is the 'comments' field of: https://graph.facebook.com/?ids=http://example.com/.

You can also use the comment FQL table.

When you figure out the code post it here for us all! :)