How to Change the […] in WordPress’ the_excerpt Hook

WordPress’ “the_excerpt()” hook has a long track record of annoying people.  On the one hand, it is a totally awesome way to grab a quick summary of the article.  On the other hand, it totally sucks, because it doesn’t provide any options (a.k.a. “parameters”).  By default, it leaves the equivalent of pigeon droppings on your blog in the form of “[…]” appearing after your blog’s summary.

Thankfully, there are a couple of ways to address the issue.  The best way to get some options in the_excerpt is to install The Excerpt Reloaded plugin, which allows for all sorts of customizations that should be included in the native the_excerpt.

But if you just need to change the “[…]” to something of your choosing, using a simple function like this is probably a better option.  I used the funtion method on a website today – just popped the provided lines of code into my functions.php file – and it worked like a charm!

// Edit the_excerpt
function gpp_excerpt($text) { 
	return str_replace('[...]', '... 
Read the rest of this entry »', $text); } add_filter('the_excerpt', 'gpp_excerpt');
Posted in ,

2 Comments

  1. the_content() instead of the_excerpt() on March 22, 2010 at 7:45 am

    hello.
    i got 1 question
    lets say i want:

    the_excerpt() instead of the_content()

    how i do it, and in what file. functions.php

    thanks



  2. Toby on March 22, 2010 at 5:09 pm

    You need to change that in your theme files. For example, index.php.



RSS From Toby’s Blog

  • Where uncertainty exists, don’t order specific.
    4 Idiot Case Studies with 2 simple age-old business lessons. The post Where uncertainty exists, don’t order specific. appeared first on Toby Cryns, WordPress Trainer in Minneapolis, MN.
  • “Now THAT was a good meeting!”
    A single effective meeting can change the course of history for a company. Imagine if you could lead effective meetings EVERY DAY! You can, but it takes curiosity & practice. This article is a good place to start your journey to a more effective you. The post “Now THAT was a good meeting!” appeared first […]
  • Never Respond to RFPs & Custom Proposal Requests
    Y'all who work at normal 9-5 jobs don't need to deal with the B.S. that is an RFP process (or rather you get paid to deal with it). But us freelancers gotta deal with a whole big bag of schtuff when it comes to custom proposals. Here's my quick-and-dirty RFP filtering process that I use […]

More posts from themightymo.com

My WordPress Maintenance Process

By The Mighty Mo! Design Co. | March 2, 2023

A few quick things: My WordPress Maintenance Process Demo, Part 1 Transcript: You’ll see immediately after logging in, you see the 11 updates needed as well as some messages. I’m just gonna quickly read. It looks like this. I don’t need to worry about. Are you enjoying Monster Insights? Not really <laugh>. What’s to enjoy…

How to style FacetWP checkbox hierarchy results using jQuery

By The Mighty Mo! Design Co. | February 21, 2023

I recently invested many hours trying to target and style a FacetWP taxonomy facet that uses hierarchy for display. It should be noted that you can use straight up CSS for some styling (and should use css wherever possible), but sometimes you need javascript to target parent elements and such. I thought I’d document the…

How to fix SpinupWP ballooning disk space issue

By The Mighty Mo! Design Co. | February 1, 2023

A site we host on Digital Ocean recently went down. It took me a lot of troubleshooting and digging before realizing that the issue was that our disk space was maxed out on Digital Ocean. The site in question needs ~20gb of space, so our 50gb server should be plenty. But alas, there it was…

RSS From Toby’s Blog

  • Where uncertainty exists, don’t order specific.
    4 Idiot Case Studies with 2 simple age-old business lessons. The post Where uncertainty exists, don’t order specific. appeared first on Toby Cryns, WordPress Trainer in Minneapolis, MN.
  • “Now THAT was a good meeting!”
    A single effective meeting can change the course of history for a company. Imagine if you could lead effective meetings EVERY DAY! You can, but it takes curiosity & practice. This article is a good place to start your journey to a more effective you. The post “Now THAT was a good meeting!” appeared first […]
  • Never Respond to RFPs & Custom Proposal Requests
    Y'all who work at normal 9-5 jobs don't need to deal with the B.S. that is an RFP process (or rather you get paid to deal with it). But us freelancers gotta deal with a whole big bag of schtuff when it comes to custom proposals. Here's my quick-and-dirty RFP filtering process that I use […]