[Plugin: Summarize Posts] available arguments & display

The “short excerpt” is the only part of that which may be difficult. It’s MUCH easier if you force yourself to always use the “excerpt” field instead of relying on WP’s poorly implemented support of the <!--more--> separator and the wonky event that parses it.

If you want total control over the output, you should do this in PHP in your theme somewhere. It’s much more configurable over the shortcode options.

The shortcode option can get you some usable results (see the examples here: http://code.google.com/p/wordpress-summarize-posts/wiki/Examples_get_posts).

E.g. try this on:

[summarize_posts]<a href="[+guid+]">[+post_title+]</a> [+post_modified+]<br/>[+post_excerpt+][/summarize_posts]

I really think WP has done a disservice here conditioning users to think that things like menus are “one-size-fits-all”. They aren’t. If you want custom results, you have to do some custom coding. Things like changing the date format on your posts is only possible via dynamic scripting.

Hope that helps.

The “date_format” bit there is not a valid placeholder, so of course it’s not getting populated with anything. Using the [+help+] placeholder should output all available placeholders for you (at least in current versions… can’t remember if that’s present in the old versions). [+post_modified+] or [+post_date+] are valid placeholders: they will contain the datestamp of when your post was modified or created, respectively. If you want to change the date format, you can use the date_format as an argument, NOT as a placeholder. From http://code.google.com/p/wordpress-summarize-posts/wiki/get_posts:

[summarize_posts post_type="musicalnotes" date_format="1"]
[+post_title+] [+post_date+]<br/>
[/summarize_posts]

You can also try adding in “help” as a parameter to trigger the printing of debugging info, e.g.:

[summarize_posts post_type="musicalnotes" date_format="1" help="1"]
[+post_title+] [+post_date+]<br/>
[/summarize_posts]

I would download the latest version of the Custom Content Type Manager first — I’m not sure how the now dated Summarize Posts code is behaving (Summarize Posts is now bundled with CCTM). Again, you get infinitely more options if you do this in the PHP — including debugging info.

E.g.

<?php
$Q = new GetPostsQuery();
$args = array();
$args['post_type'] = 'musicalnotes';
$results = $Q->get_posts($args);
print $Q->debug();

If you can do that for me and paste the results in Pastebin, I can comment on what’s going on with the code. Otherwise, the only thing I could do for you would be if you emailed me a login to your site including FTP info.

First argument listed in the docs is the “limit” argument (see http://code.google.com/p/wordpress-summarize-posts/wiki/get_posts), so you’d just add that to your shortcode to specify the maximum number of results you want to see, e.g.

[summarize_posts post_type='musicalnotes' date_format='1' limit='5']
<tr>
<td>[+post_title+]</td><td width="10"></td><td>[+post_date+]</td>
</tr>
[/summarize_posts]

Do you see in that debugging output that all the available arguments are listed for you? E.g. you can add arguments for “limit”, “append”, or “taxonomy”.

The border on the table is entirely in your control: your CSS in your theme has probably defined a CSS rule that puts a border around the table, so you’ll have to customize your CSS rules.

Better double check the WP site: the most current version (as of today) is 0.9.5.3: https://img.skitch.com/20120104-baq3dqgt12c4rbpurutxmb32qy.jpg