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1. fgary308
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   I am building a page that will include a single main post area that will show a featured picture and excerpt from a post and below that will show older posts with just their excerpts. I intend to devote enough space to the new/main post to allow it to be say 200 words long. However for the old posts I only want to devote enough space for say 100 words. Of course this will impact the way that I write my excerpts so that the first 100 words are a sufficient "hook".
   I have seen some code that allows you to change the length of an excerpt generated from the content of the post but nobody seems to tackle the_excerpt. How I can I write some code that will retrieve the explicit excerpt (the_excerpt) and return only the first 100 words? Can I do it on a sentence level?

2. alchymyth
   The Sweeper
   Posted 1 year ago #

   have a look at this article: automatically-shorten-manual-excerpt

   if you change this line:
   $text = strip_tags($text);
   you can include html tags that you want to preserve for the excerpt:
   http://www.w3schools.com/php/func_string_strip_tags.asp

3. fgary308
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   I just tried that approach and it seems to do a great job of trimming the length of a declared excerpt. However, it trimmed all of my excerpts and I'm not sure how to set it up so that I can declare within a style sheet if an excerpt should be trimmed or not.

4. alchymyth
   The Sweeper
   Posted 1 year ago #

   if you are prepared to use your own function to make the excerpt, you could use:

   function custom_trim_excerpt($length) {
   global $post;
   $explicit_excerpt = $post->post_excerpt;
     if ( '' == $explicit_excerpt ) {
       $text = get_the_content('');
       $text = apply_filters('the_content', $text);
       $text = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $text);
     }
     else {
       $text = apply_filters('the_content', $explicit_excerpt);
     }
   $text = strip_shortcodes( $text ); // optional
   $text = strip_tags($text);
   $excerpt_length = $length;
   $words = explode(' ', $text, $excerpt_length + 1);
     if (count($words)> $excerpt_length) {
       array_pop($words);
       array_push($words, '[…]');
       $text = implode(' ', $words);
       $text = apply_filters('the_excerpt',$text);
     }
   return $text;
   }

   this needs to be saved to functions.php of the theme.

   the function uses the explicit excerpt if filled in, or makes an excerpt from the content; and trims both to the max length as specified in the parameter.

   in the template files, where you want to show the excerpt, you need to add:
   <?php echo custom_trim_excerpt(100); ?>

   the parameter is the cut-off length of the excerpt.

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