Wordpress - how to make an excerpt show on the home page?

Question

In my Wordpress blog, I have a number of categories, and there is a number of posts there are in each category.

The home page shows the all posts that I put into any category and the full summary of each and every post.

I'd like to show just a excerpt of the all post in the home page... how can i make this?

I'm using Wordpress 3.0

Answer 1

There are two ways to do this, and it all depends on what you wish to achieve, and the level of involvement and control you wish to have.

Without editing template, more control but less automatic

1. Edit the post
2. Click the 'More Button' in the Rich Text Editor where you would like to break your text.
3. Assuming your theme was developed to Wordpress standards, your posts should be shortened up until the point where you put the 'More' break.

The other option is to edit the theme files and utilize the 'the_excerpt()' function, this is more automatic, and you have more control, but is not ideal for every situation [depending on your theme you may already be using this, but possibly not the way you want to]

1. Determine where you would like to shorten your posts. Homepage? Archives (tags, categories, dated archives)?
2. Open those theme files into a development application or code/text editor
3. Search for 'the_content()' and replace it with 'the_excerpt()'
4. This function will either return text that you place into the 'Excerpt' field in the 'Edit Post' screen, it's normally below 'Post Body.' [Important Note: If you cannot see the field 'excerpt,' click the button 'Screen Options' at the top right of the screen and ensure that the_excerpt is checked]
5. If there is no text in the 'excerpt' field, then it will grab the first 55 words from the content.