Change excerpt on front page to full content

[Edit: Good Evening ClaytonJames! Child themes are our friend. 😉 ]

So you did. Justin’s themes are always good reading.

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/my-life

Here’s how to pull it off, you just need to create and edit some files.

Create a child theme of My Life.

– Make a new empty directory wp-content/themes/my-life-child and copy this style.css into it.

/*
Theme Name:My Life Child Theme
Version: 1.0
Description: A child theme of Justin Tadlock's My Life theme
Template: my-life
*/

/* Import layout */
@import url(../my-life/style.css);

Now in your dashboard, activate the new theme you just created called “My Life Child Theme” and visit your blog. It should look identical to before and you’ve just made your own child theme.

– Copy the file content.php from wp-content/themes/my-life to wp-content/themes/my-life-child and modify one line.

Change line 44 from

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

to read

<?php the_content(); ?>

Save that copy and visit your WordPress site. If all goes well you’ll get the full content now and not an excerpt.

But wait! There’s more! The home page shows the features image if you use them. For full content that looks a little odd to me so if you want to hide that, add these lines to your style.css file in wp-content/themes/my-life-child

.thumbnail {
        display: none;
}

That CSS will hide the featured image.

You could just edit the original content.php file (don’t) but if something goes wrong with the child theme, just delete wp-content/themes/my-life-child/content.php and you’ll be back to normal.