I decided not to use a plugin because I find it easier to just edit the templates directly. Here is the code:

<?php
$results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT ID, comment_count FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'post' && post_status = 'publish' ORDER BY comment_count DESC LIMIT 5");
foreach ($results as $r):
	query_posts(array('p' => $r->ID));
	while (have_posts()):
		the_post();
?>
<!-- regular wordpress loop code goes here -->
<?php endwhile; endforeach; ?>

This code manually calls a SQL query because there is no template tag that supports this method of sorting as of Wordpress 2.7. We are only querying for the post IDs because we will use that ID to call up the Wordpress loop which will allow us to use the normal template tags inside the manual Wordpress loop.

• Loading INI Files in PHP