What you’re looking for is built into WordPress. Add this to your content where you want the “read more” link to appear:
<!--more-->
If using WP 1.5.x or WP 2.0 but with the non-WYSIWYG editor, click the “more” Quicktag to insert the above automatically. (In the WYSIWYG editor it’s the icon that looks like a page with a dotted line cutting through it.)
Kafkaesqui, is it possible to use something like the <!–more–> comment for just the category pages? I want my posts on the main page to be full, but if someone selects a category page, I would like to cut it off early.
That’s again a built-in feature.
What theme are you using? Normal theme have the_excerpt in archive view (file) – and when you see a category, that’s actually an “archive” of that category.
Replace the_content template tag with the_excerpt in your archive.php file.
More: Template_Tags/the_excerpt and related links from there.
sfam, there’s several ways you can go about this.
One option (as moshu points out) is to use the_excerpt() in a theme’s category.php or archive.php template while manually providing a “more” link (the permalink to the post) in the template’s code. Then use the_content() everywhere else. A limitation to this is you can’t use the ‘more’ tag in posts so you lose some control over where the break occurs, but this can be alleviated by providing the excerpt text to the post.
Another is to go into your theme’s index.php (or home.php, if it has one) and swap out the_content() template tag with something like:
<?php
echo apply_filters('the_content', $post->post_content);
?>
A little geeky, but what it does is display a post’s content–with built-in and plugin filters in operation, but bypasses certain features of the_content() tag, such as parsing ‘more’. It also slips over password protection, so if that’s in use on your blog it would be a problem.
Finally, a few of the ‘auto-more’ plugins *could* be rewritten to work on only certain types of WP queries (i.e. category pages):
http://www.thunderguy.com/semicolon/wordpress/evermore-wordpress-plugin/
http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/PostTeaser
The last suggestion is even more geeky…
Hi Moshu, I’m using the Semiologic theme, but am using the structured blogging template (specifically the hReview one) for the actual blog entries. For some reason this doesn’t have an excerpt field. Would this be an easy think to take the excerpt field from the default template and load it into the structured blogging template?
