Most wordpress themes combine comments with trackbacks, if you want to separate comments and trackbacks so that it will looks more organized, then you can follow the below step by step guide.

Step 1

Open comments.php and look for

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

Paste after

<?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?>
<?php if($comment_type == 'comment') { ?>

Step 2

Scroll down a bit and look for

<?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

Paste before

<?php } else { $trackback = true; } /* End of is_comment statement */ ?>

Step 3

Look for

<?php else : // this is displayed if there are no comments so far ?>

Paste before

<?php if ($trackback == true) { ?>
<h3>Trackbacks</h3>
<ol>
<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
<?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?>
<?php if($comment_type != 'comment') { ?>
<li><?php comment_author_link() ?></li>
<?php } ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ol>
<?php } ?>

Many blogs have display most popular posts on their blog to make visitors stay longer on their posts, this is one of the way to attract more visitors to your blog. We actually can install a wordpress popular posts plugin to display our most popular posts, but if you don’t want to use plugin, you can simply hack your wordpress theme to do it manually.

Copy and paste the following code to the sidebar.php file, if you want to change the number of displayed posts, simply change the “5″ to your desired number.

<h2>Popular Posts</h2>
<ul>
<?php $result = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT comment_count,ID,post_title FROM $wpdb->posts ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 0 , 5");
foreach ($result as $post) {
setup_postdata($post);
$postid = $post->ID;
$title = $post->post_title;
$commentcount = $post->comment_count;
if ($commentcount != 0) { ?>
<li><a href="<?php echo get_permalink($postid); ?>" title="<?php echo $title ?>">
<?php echo $title ?></a> {<?php echo $commentcount ?>}</li>
<?php } } ?>
</ul>

Please note that the 5 most popular posts displayed is basing on the 5 most commented posts .