Open source training & tutorials from experienced, passionate people
By A Web Design
Whenever any Blog reader lands on your Blog site, what they notice very quickly is whether your Blog home page displays – Full Blog Posts – or – Excerpted Blog posts.
When you have excerpts of Blog posts displayed on the home page, the home page looks like the page displayed in diagram 1.
Diagram 1
When the – Read more... - link is clicked the complete Blog post is displayed in the Bowser window, as shown in diagram 2.
Diagram 2
When the – Read more... - link is clicked the complete Blog post is displayed in the Bowser window, as shown in diagram 2.
Here is how you can get the - Read more… - link to appear within the content of any Blog post.
Method 1: Using The More Tag Available In The WordPress Editor.
This method is usually the easiest.
When the Blog post is completed, place the editor cursor where you want the – Read more – link to appear in the Blog post content. Then locate and click the Read More icon in the WordPress Blog post editor when the – Visual – tab is active as shown in diagram 3.
Diagram 3
This causes the Read more link to appear exactly where the editor’s cursor was placed. NOTE: Using the template´s CSS file we have styled our - Read more - link to look special on our Blog. You could do the same if you want to.
Your homepage, and category pages, will now display only the first section of the post, and a – Read more - link which links to the rest of the Blog post.
Open your index.php template file, and change the following line:
<?php the_content('Place your custom message content here'); ?>
For example:
<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>
Do take careful not of the single quote marks that enclose the custom message and the semicolon terminator.
Method 2: Post Excerpts Function
In WordPress, to use the post excerpts function you will have to edit some of the template files. Either two files ( or one file ) needs to be edited.
They are:
If you do not have these files for any reason then:
In these files, search for and replace the following line:
<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?> With <?php the_excerpt(); ?>
Your pages will now show a Blog post excerpt instead of the Blog Post content in full. To load post content, readers will have to click the post title. However it is really not good idea to force Blog readers to do this to read Blog post content.
To solve this, simply add a link below the excerpt content, which when clicked loads the rest of the article. To do that, just beneath the line edited above, add the following codespec:
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Read the rest of <?php the_title(); ?>" class="more-link">Read the rest of this entry »</a>
You could also customize the message displayed if you want to. i.e. What´s displayed in italics. By default, WordPress only shows the first 55 words of any post as its excerpt.
This excerpt content can be changed if you want to. Pasting whatever you want to be displayed as the Blog post excerpt - Optional Excerpt - box displayed in the - Write Post screen. This box permits the formatting of excerpt content using HTML code if you are familiar with HTML code.
NOTE: If the Optional Excerpt Box is not displayed in your WordPress, editor, look at the top right hand corner of the editor page and locate the – Screen Options – tab. Click on the tab. In the slide out section select the Excerpt checkbox as shown diagram 4.
Diagram 4
Using this technique you can choose to display different text on the Blog home page as the excerpt that points to a specific Blog post. The post itself being accessed by either clicking the excerpt headline or the Read more link.
NOTE: Partial RSS feeds truncated after the Read More link are not an issue in all versions of WordPress above version 2.5.
Please wait...