Choosing your excerpt length/cut-off

When you have a page displaying posts, whether it’s your default posts page set in General >> Reading, or a regular page using Pro Framework’s Post List feature, you have an option to display post excerpts.

The post excerpt is simply the shortened version of your entire post. This enables you to have a page displaying any number of posts without the page being too long.

Be default, Pro Framework sets your excerpts to show 50 words, but of course, this option is easily changed.

The default word count option can be found here: Framework >> General Options >> Blog

This Blog tab reveals a bunch of options dealing with post excerpts, but for this presentation, we’ll focus on the Excerpt or full option box.

First, we can choose whether we want to display excerpts, or full posts.

Then we can specify a word count for when Pro Framework automatically creates the excerpt.

Great, but how do we know that 50 words will be a good cut-off on all of our posts? Unfortunately, we don’t. If we hit 50 words in the middle of a sentence, the sentence will be cut off with “…” and a Continue reading button (the button text is editable in the same tab as shown above).

We can, however, specify a specific cut-off point inside of our posts, or display a completely custom excerpt to display.

First, we’ll take a look at specifying specific cut-off points inside of our posts.

Here’s an excerpt being automatically generated. It’s also using Pro Framework’s Post Image feature.

And here’s what it looks like while we’re editing the post.Notice how the image and bold words inside the content never made it into the excerpt? Default excerpts strip quite a few HTML tags, including images and bold tags.

Now, let’s choose a point within our post to create a cut-off.We’ll choose the end of the second paragraph.Then we need to click the “More” tag icon, highlighted below.

Inserting the “More” tag allows us to choose a specific point to end our excerpt. It also includes everything inside of your post, including formatting and images. Since the excerpt will now be showing an image, our post image will remove itself.

There’s one more way we can specify a custom excerpt, which is using WordPress’ default Excerpt field.

If you don’t see this box while editing your post, you need to reveal it by opening the Screen Options window.

Now look for the Excerpt field and check the box next to it.

The Excerpt field has the same rules as the automatically generated excerpts – it strips images and other formatting.

If you’re going to go this route, or the automatic route, it’s a good idea to include a Post Image to bring a little life to the page.

Choosing your excerpt length/cutoff

That’s it! Please visit Pro Framework to learn more.

By Thomas Usborne