Create more than you consume

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WordPress Excerpt control

There are a few ways to control the length of your blogs excerpt in WordPress, the first you may know, the second way… well – this post will explain other ways to do this. It’s really quite simple. But you’ll have noticed the excerpt for this blog post is shorter than most of the others no?

The complicated way to do this is via theme functions and editing how many words or characters they should show before the “read more” link shows up. That’s quite fancy and all but you may be left with an excerpt that looks like thi…  unless your code really is clever 🙂

But why mess around with all that fancy jiggery pokery? WordPress makes it much easier. The way I have controlled the excerpt in this post is to add a very simple snippet of code – in fact WordPress allows you to insert it at the press of a button

Screen Shot 2013-10-27 at 09.39.10

The final icon adds a “More” dividers to your blog post, and if your theme is written correctly, the excerpt will be any text before this and your full blog will be everything before and after this. Pretty nifty yes?

The other way to control your excerpt length and content would be to select the “screen options” at the top of your blog post editor in the admin panel, and tick the excerpt. This displays another box where you can enter a custom excerpt which is different than your blog post completely.

The final way is to do nothing, and let WordPress automatically crop your blog content to show the excerpt, it does this pretty well 🙂

Which do you use? Do you bother crafting your excerpts manually? do you use the “More” code insert to the blog post or do you just blog away and let WordPress take care of the rest?


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