Comments on: Improving WordPress’ the_excerpt() template tag

By: Richard Sweeney

Richard Sweeney — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:52:22 +0000

Excellent, this is exactly what I was looking for! Many thanks for the easy to follow post!

I might just mention that the code in the post is extremely difficult to read… Dark blue text on a dark grey background is not an ideal combination!

By: kevin

kevin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:01:14 +0000

Great tip, i was in the need for this. Thanks!

By: Artem Russakovskii

Artem Russakovskii — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:44:43 +0000

Aaron, take a look at this ticket http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10395. It fixes some of the problems described here by introducing extra filters (number of words and the excerpt ending) but it still forces tag stripping.

Just thought I’d let you know.

By: Spider M. Mann

Spider M. Mann — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:34:19 +0000

I have come up with a working solution to the problem of adding a “read more” link (or some sort of anchor tag) to the ‘[...]‘ at the end of the excerpt. I have also included my ‘balanced tags’ solution from above.

I would post it here, but the filters would eat the code, so I posted a short article at my site:
Fixing The Excerpt In WordPress

If you would like, you can change the ‘[...]‘ to ‘read more’ or whatever you would like it to say. I hope you all can stop by and check it out.

By: Fixing The Excerpt In WordPress « Palehorse Information Services

Fixing The Excerpt In WordPress « Palehorse Information Services — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:07:54 +0000

[...] best solution we have found to these limitations was provided by Aaron Russell, but this also had just a couple of stumbling blocks, as evidenced by reading through the comments [...]

By: Zuri

Zuri — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:40:39 +0000

For those looking to add an anchor tag to the [...] tag, change your “if” statement to the following.

if (count($words)> $excerpt_length) {
array_pop($words);
array_push($words, ‘[...]‘);
$text = implode(‘ ‘, $words);
echo “read more“;
}

It works for me, except for the fact that I can’t get the “read more” to appear at the end of the excerpt. :-s

By: Ayoma

Ayoma — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:24:32 +0000

Thanks a lot for the clear and easy steps. It saved my time with removing JavaScript “var fbShare = {url: …..” from my site…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:12:02 +0000

[...] [...]

By: byK – Wordpress: Latest Post per Category Homepage

byK – Wordpress: Latest Post per Category Homepage — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:29:57 +0000

[...] http://www.aaronrussell.co.uk/blog/improving-wordpress-the_excerpt/ [...]

By: Dan Smart

Dan Smart — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:45:58 +0000

@marvin – instead of editing the function prototype, you could get the value from a constant or an option somewhere in the WP Admin.

So you could make it either:

define(‘EXCERPT_LENGTH’, 25);

improved_trim_excerpt($text) {
$excerpt_length = EXCERPT_LENGTH;
}

or
improved_trim_excerpt($text) {
$excerpt_length = get_option(‘excerpt_length’);
}

(of course you’ll have to add the option first – would be worth creating a plugin to do this, as it’d separate it out. In fact, this might be my next blog post…)