How to remove inline Recent Comments style from WordPress

.recent_comments style block in Html Head section

Have you seen the following code inside the HEAD section of your WordPress blog source code?

%MINIFYHTMLb36601d4e64e5719eab7c4befe0895397%

Ever wonder how it got there, and how to get rid of it?

The inline style gets injected into the head section when you use the Recent Comments widget. The widget applies a filter to wp_head() when it is activated.

In order to get rid of the inline style, short of modifying the core file (not advised), is to apply a filter of our own. Let’s get to work on that.

Move the styling to your theme style.css file

Copy the following code to your theme css file:

.recentcomments a{display:inline !important;padding: 0 !important;margin: 0 !important;}

Once you have the code inside your style.css file, you can edit it to your hearts content.

Add a filter to remove a filter (Pre 2.8)

The wp_head filter for wp_widget_recent_comments_style was dropped in WordPress 2.8, and was renamed to recent_comments_style. Why it was not removed altogether is a mystery.

Yep, seems a little crazy, but we are going to add a filter to remove the stock WordPress filter.

Add the following to your theme functions.php file:

function remove_wp_widget_recent_comments_style() {
   if ( has_filter('wp_head', 'wp_widget_recent_comments_style') ) {
      remove_filter('wp_head', 'wp_widget_recent_comments_style' );
   }
}
add_filter( 'wp_head', 'remove_wp_widget_recent_comments_style', 1 );

Here we are adding a filter via the WordPress add_filter() method. The first argument, wp_head, which is the hook where the style filter gets applied in the first place.

The second argument is the callback to our custom filter, remove_wp_widget_recent_comments_style().

The third parameter is the priority of when our filter will get processed. We are setting this to 1 to insure that it takes priority over the WordPress core function. If this argument is too higher of a number, then we run the risk of our filter not taking precedence.

Our custom filter is simple, it first checks to see if the WordPress filter is present. If it is present, then we simply remove the filter. The remove_filter() function takes the same arguments as add_filter()

Add an action to remove an action (2.9.1 and on)

After reading later comments that were recently posted, it became clear that later versions of WordPress caused the original filter fix above not to work. Investigation reveals that the original filter was dropped in 2.8, renamed and is now an action that fires during widgets_init.

Why they did not just drop this altogether is a mystery. It is something that should be handled via a stylesheet. In fact, if you look at the TwentyTen theme that comes with the later versions of WordPress 3.0 and on, you will find that theme addresses this issue with the following snippet of code in their functions.php file:

function twentyten_remove_recent_comments_style() {
	global $wp_widget_factory;
	remove_action( 'wp_head', array( $wp_widget_factory->widgets['WP_Widget_Recent_Comments'], 'recent_comments_style' ) );
}
add_action( 'widgets_init', 'twentyten_remove_recent_comments_style' );

Drop this code into your functions.php file and the styling will be removed from your Head section.

The history of this snippet was originally suggested by Andrew Nacin in a comment to a bug that Artem Russakovskii opened up in the WordPress tracker. Artem’s solution for removing the inline style for the Recent Comments is exactly the same as what the TwentyTen theme uses.

What is odd with this whole thing is that the styling disappeared for a short while during 2.8 and magically showed up in 2.9.1.

Some thoughts

While the inline style does not hurt anything, some purists just hate seeing it there in the first place. It is one of those quirky things that WordPress code does to you.

The remove_filter() WordPress function can come in handy for other things that bug the heck out of you. One example would be the curly quotes that replace normal quotes inside of your posts and pages.

You can remove the wptexturize filter from any of the following hooks for example:

remove_filter('category_description', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('list_cats', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('comment_author', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('comment_text', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('single_post_title', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_title', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'wptexturize');

You can think of remove_filter is to WordPress, as reset.css is to style sheets. Wonderful world it is.