web2feel.com – Free wordpress themes – Tutorials – Tips and tricks

On many of mine or other magazine type of WordPress themes, you would see the homepage displaying blocks of post excerpts. These excerpts are generated using the template tag

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

By default this template tag returns the first 55 words of the post’s content. This teaser is generated only if you have not specified any custom excerpt from your post editor section. But what if you want to display more than 55 words on your excerpts? Simple, just add the following code to your theme function.php file. It will return first 100 words of post’s content.

function new_excerpt_length($length) {
	return 100;
}
add_filter('excerpt_length', 'new_excerpt_length');

What about the [...] string at the end of excerpt

By default WordPress excerpts shows a [...] string at the end of the excerpt. what if you want to change this to a link. something like [Read More] which links to full post view.To do that just add the following code to your functions.php file.

function new_excerpt_more($more) {
return '<a href="'. get_permalink($post->ID) . '">' . ' [Read More]' . '</a>';
}
add_filter('excerpt_more', 'new_excerpt_more');

Reference: WordPress Codex