petercoles said:

Providing you have your relationship between posts and comments set up correctly, you can simply pass the posts.

If you are then looping through the posts using say,

foreach ($posts as $post)

then each post contains a post object and post->comments will contain a collection of comments for that post.

As collections have a count() method, you can round this off by adding

Comments ({{ $post->comments->count() }})

to your view.

That is exactly what I'm looking for. But how do I make sure I have the correct setup?

Building the db from migrations I was unable to use foreign keys. It gave me an error I was unable to resolve.

Am I correct in assuming I need to fix my db setup to include foreign keys?

You would setup your Comments table to have a post_id column. That would be your key. Then you would setup the relationship:

// Posts model
$this->hasMany('Comment');

// Comments model
$this->belongsTo('Post');

It maybe your database doesn't support foreign keys as an index, but setting a column name with an id from the other table will be similar.

Where in the above do you point to the column post_id as being the fk we're interested in? How would it know?

protected $table = 'posts';
protected $primaryKey = 'id';
$this->hasMany('Comment');

The above gives me an error: syntax error, unexpected '$this' (T_VARIABLE), expecting function (T_FUNCTION)

It seems I just got the structure wrong. I found my answer here: http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent#one-to-many

Thank you for the help!