Customize your excerpts

Posted on May 8, 2006 | Category: Wordpress

In WordPress (at least as far as I know – please correct me if I’m wrong) there are two functions that allow you to output your post content.

These functions are:

• the_content (to which certain parameters can be passed). This function will output images, links…basically everything as you typed it in your post.
• the_excerpt (to which no parameters can be passed). This function will output the post excerpt if there is one or it will output up to the first 55 words of your post content in a pure text form.

As you will have noticed I use both these functions here at renet@web. I use the_content to output the latest post and then the_excerpt to display the next 4 posts.

There are two things that I never liked with the function the_excerpt:

• The post excerpt displayed terminates with the characters [...]
• The length of the post excerpt is 55 words long and I never knew where that value could be changed

But despair no more, thanks to John Wrana a cure is at hand and in fact full credits are given to him for coming up with this trick of sorts. I should also warn you that if you do not understand what is indicated below, then you should not attempt to do this at home (then again maybe it’s my accent that makes it hard to understand) – this implies changing standard WordPress files – proceed at your own risk.

My comprehension of German is a bit dodgy (haven’t been using it for quite some time), but what I could make in John’s post is that we need to change a bit of code in the file functions-formatting.php which you should find in the wp-includes folder of your WordPress installation. What you need to do is to, in that file find the function

d3BfdHJpbV9leGNlcnB0KCk6

.

Bearing in mind what I said above, in that function I changed two things:

A) The number of words displayed in the post excerpt.
1. Change in the line where it says:

2. JGV4Y2VycHRfbGVuZ3RoID0gNTU7

3. the number of words you want to see in your excerpt.
4. Change the value ’55′ to whatever you want.

B) The standard ending characters [...] in the post excerpt.
1. Change in the line where it says:

2. YXJyYXlfcHVzaCgkd29yZHMsICdbLi4uXScpOw==

3. The characters [...] to whatever you want.
4. You may decide to just change it to something like –> or … or >>>

Before, I press this post, I should also point out that Chris J. Davis has written a wonderful post where he explains how to customize post excerpt using a more sophisticated method.

» Filed Under Wordpress

5 Responses to “Customize your excerpts”

1. Oliver Zheng Says:
   May 8th, 2006 at 4:10 pm

   Or you could write an excerpt ;)

   I’m doing it the hard way. Using the

   bW9yZQ==

   thing, and custom fields to achieve the effect so certain templates recognize different content. This way seems a lot easier, but it cuts off words.

2. Pascal Says:
   May 8th, 2006 at 7:53 pm

   Oliver, how are you going to do it? I mean is it going to be in the form of a plugin or are you going to hack the wordpress code? Sounds promising.

3. Oliver Zheng Says:
   May 9th, 2006 at 3:39 am

   I have the “” at the end of where I want it in a post, and if indeed a post is long and needs to be shortened, it’s given a custom field as well. That way, the templates can recognize when to display the whole post or just everything before , based on the custom field.

   It’s kind of tedius, but I don’t mind :)

4. Jeremy Says:
   May 23rd, 2006 at 2:44 am

   Hey there – Nice posting!
   I am curious.. I found this post through http://www.chrisjdavis.org/2006/05/06/custom-excerpts-for-wordpress/

   Question: Were you able to get Chris’s method to work for you as well?

5. Pascal Says:
   May 23rd, 2006 at 11:36 am

   Hi Jeremy.
   To be honnest I did not even try to implement Chris’s method. I found his post after having done my changes.
   Did you have a crack it?

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