List Pages With Excerpt Of Each Page

You will not get the excerpts for Pages. It just dosn’t work like that.
Normally there is no ‘multi-Page’ display as in the case of ‘multi-post’ display (like category or monthly archives).
So, unless you write a plugin or modify core files… give it up.

Your “good exaample” is absolutely NOT doing what you are talkong about. Or we see different blogs…
It does not display Page excerpts because excerpts don’t work with Pages. I thought I was clear about it.
Sorry, I don’t know what core files should be modified.

I think I might have a solution to this (WP v2.2):

I have a parent page that has 5 children and I wanted to show the excerpt for each child page on the parent page. The first thing that I did was install a plug-in called Excerpt Editor. This plug-in enables you to create excerpts for pages as well as other helpful things that pertain to excerpts…

After activating this plug-in ( and creating excerpts for all of it’s children ), I created a new template file and titled it “Summary Page”. I then applied this template to the parent page. This template consists of the following code:

<div class="page">
	<h3><?php the_title(); ?> <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '(', ')'); ?></h3>
	<?php
	$pageChildren = $wpdb->get_results("
		SELECT *
		FROM $wpdb->posts
		WHERE post_parent = ".$post->ID."
		AND post_type = 'page'
		ORDER BY menu_order
	", 'OBJECT');

	if ( $pageChildren ) :
		foreach ( $pageChildren as $pageChild ) :
			setup_postdata( $pageChild );
			?>

		<h4><?php print '<a href="' . get_permalink( $pageChild->ID ) . '">' . get_the_title( $pageChild->ID ) . '</a>'; ?></h4>
		<div class="entry">
			<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
		</div>

		<?php
		endforeach;
	endif;
	?>
</div>

Hope that someone finds this useful 🙂

Questions for mfields (and others in the know)

1. What code did you use to apply the summary page template to the parent? (I’m just getting into php)

2. On the site I will be creating, some of the child pages have child pages themselves and so I would like to be able to create a loop or something, that will only show the excerpts of child pages 1 level deep and if there are no child pages display normal page content. ie:

If page has children {
display the_excerpt(depth of 1) //I would probably put the TEMPLATEPATH link here and mod the code in summary.php
}
else {
the_content();
}

I’m sure it’s something simple, but I can’t get the code right.

3. The plugin outputs a heap of divs (I think more than any good css’er would need). Has anyone made any mods to the output markup?

I’m not sure if I made sense in the post above, so I’ve tweaked the example pages to illustrate where things are going wrong more succinctly.

The parent page in the link displays a hard coded example of how I want the page to look. I’ve created excerpts for each child page to match and enabled html in the_ excerpt().

Below the hard coded example are excerpts called by ‘mfields’ code listed earlier in this thread. As you can see, the excerpt is an auto generated excerpt using a portion of the post, ignoring my custom excerpt.

However, if you click through to any of the child pages, you’ll see that WordPress is quite happy to display my custom excerpt in the_excerpt() within the loop.

NB: I’ve used both advanced-excerpt and excerpt-editor plugins to create, manage and display html excerpts. WordPress 2.3.1 seems to be quite happy to display html excerpts without the use of either – unless my ISP is doing some funky caching thang.

Does anyone know what’s going on?

excentricjester,

Hi.

1. To apply the page template to the parent page, no code is needed just log into the wordpress admin section and edit the parent page. look on the right-hand sidebar of the edit screen and you should see a drop-down under the heading of “Page Template”. As long as you have saved the approiate code as a template file in your theme’s directory, the template should show up in the drop down list. If none of this made any sense, please see this page about creating page templates

2. The query that I authored will only show childern for the given page that it is applied to. No grandchildren will show up. Hypotheticaly, you could set your second level page’s “Page Template” to summary also. this should work although I have not personally tried it. In the case that it does it might be a good idea to code some sort of “one-level up” and/or “root” type links.

3. Do you mean the “Excerpt Editor” plugin? In the event that this plugin is causing trouble for you, you can delete it and use the new streamlined method:

Copy and paste this code into your functions.php file and upload to you template directory…

// Add Excerpts to pages in admin
//---------------------------------------
add_action( 'dbx_page_advanced', 'mfAddExcerpt2Pages' );
function mfAddExcerpt2Pages(){
	global $post;
?>
	<div class="dbx-b-ox-wrapper">
	<fieldset id="postexcerpt" class="dbx-box">
	<div class="dbx-h-andle-wrapper">
	<h3 class="dbx-handle"><?php _e('Optional Excerpt') ?></h3>
	</div>
	<div class="dbx-c-ontent-wrapper">
	<div class="dbx-content"><textarea rows="1" cols="40" name="excerpt" tabindex="6" id="excerpt"><?php echo $post->post_excerpt ?></textarea></div>
	</div>
	</fieldset>
	</div>
<?php
}

Hope this answers all your questions…
Good luck to you,
-mfields

OK – I modified your query slightly using

AND post_status = 'publish'
ORDER BY menu_order

and used $post.

Same result as before – I get the auto-generated excerpts, not my explicit excerpts.

FWIW, it works fine for me without using unset(). But I’m using this code in a template file outside and after the loop, so I don’t think there are any issues there.

You’ve seen the thread I opened on exactly the issue of auto vs explicit excerpts. I’m still using your $pageChild successfully with Kafkaesqui’s recommended

<?php echo apply_filters('the_excerpt', $pageChild->post_excerpt); ?>

You can see the result here.