WordPress 3.1 with Disqus Plugin Errors for Comment Count in Admin

I noticed a while ago when I upgraded all the blogs I manage to WordPress 3.1 that there is a small problem with using the Disqus plugin in that it causes a horrible error when viewing posts page in the Admin interface.

Instead of showing the post count it instead shows:

Warning: number_format() expects parameter 1 to be double, string given in/home/dan/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line155

 

What’s going wrong?

The problem is fairly simple, because of the way the disqus plugin works it injects itself into the comment system. This means when class-wp-list-table.php calls the get_comments_number() function and passes it into the internal number_formati18n() function it causes an error because unlike vanilla WordPress comments, disqus is injecting HTML code. Making the output a string and not a decimal as expected.

How to Fix It?

Being a lazy coder I naturally Googled it and discovered Evan Wondrasek’s post on the problem, where he offers a “fix”… However, I wasn’t satisfied with the output as this means that while it fixes the problem in the WordPress backend, it still means that the front end is returned a boring number and not the nice text I like.

So, after a – surprisingly very brief – think the answer seemed obvious.

Instead of completely re-writing the disqus plugin function(s) I instead made a small alteration which solved the problem beautifully.

1. Open the file /wp-content/plugins/disqus-comment-system/disqus.php

2. Jump to the code on line 692:

function dsq_comments_number($count) {
    global $post;

	if ( dsq_can_replace()) {
		return ''.$count.'';
	} else {
		return $count;
	}
}

3. Insert && !is_admin() into the if statement

function dsq_comments_number($count) {
    global $post;

	if ( dsq_can_replace() && !is_admin()) {
		return ''.$count.'';
	} else {
		return $count;
	}
}

 

This means it will check if the code is running withing the WordPress admin panel (eg, when you are viewing posts) if it is, it will return the raw count – if not it will return as normal.

That’s it! Code should function perfectly in both Admin and Front-end!

If this helps or if you have any problems please drop a comment below!