Matt Mullenweg has a very nice feature on his site wherein each of the comments you read on a post is numbered (for example). Now, all WordPress comments are automatically numbered, but these numbers don’t start at 1 for each post. For example, the first comment on my last post was #7700. So it takes a simple hack to get the comments to be numbered 1, 2, 3 and so forth on a given post.

The WordPress support forums give enough info to figure out how to do this, and supposedly it’s in the codex, but here’s how I did it (see the results on any page with comments).

First, we need to edit your wp-comments.php file (the “Comments Template” in the theme editor). Find this line:

and replace it with this:

Then, find this line:

and add this line right above it:

What we’ve done so far will create the counter. To make it show up, we add something like this below the comment byline code:

The byline has the “comment posted at … by … ” info, and should be pretty easy to spot.

If you want to just copy my comment template in its entirety, I’ve uploaded the source here.

After that, it’s all a matter of styling it the way you want it. I added this to my stylesheet (ripping off Matt for his CSS):
.comment-number {
color: #CCCCCC;
font-family: trebuchet, verdana, arial, sans-serif;
font-style: italic;
font-variant: normal;
font-weight: normal;
font-size: 40px;
line-height: normal;
font-size-adjust: none;
font-stretch: normal;
margin-top: -45px;
float: right;
}

No, not rocket science. Yes, pretty cool. Yes, I offer WordPress hosting and will answer any crazy question you can come up with. Phil asked about this, and, though he’s not a client, I thought it was cool enough a feature to implement. It’s not added to the theme yet, but will be next time I update it.