Wordpress Hack #5: 10 Ways to Improve Navigation
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4. Wordpress More Links and Excerpts
There are two ways posts can be shown, the full posts, or an excerpt. In Wordpress Hack #1: query_posts I showed you what to add to “the loop” to make posts excerpts. For your homepage, there is an easier way to do this with the Homepage Excerpts Plugin.
This plugin (as you can see in the options above) gives the flexibility to say how many posts will be full and how many excerpted, and how many words to show. You can also choose to use “custom excerpts”, which is a field you can fill out when writing a post. It’s very important you understand how this works. When you create a post there is a field you can write you own “excerpt” into. You probably never noticed it, it’s below where you write your posts, and it looks like this:
If you write a “custom excerpt” in this field, and then use the homepage excerpts plugin and change “use custom excerpts” to “yes” - then the custom excerpt will show instead of the first 50 words from the post. This means that you can have original content on your homepage that’s not on single post pages. You could also use these custom excerpts for other things, like a featured block on your homepage. It’s a lot more work to write one for every post you have, but could be well worth it depending on how you’re using your blog.
Now that you know how to change your homepage to excerpts using a plugin, let’s find out how one hacks code in a theme to do this at will! Once again, you can find this information on the Wordpress Codex page “Customizing the Read More”. On any wordpress theme template page that displays posts in a “10 per page” fashion, like your homepage (index.php), a category or tag page (category.php or tag.php if you have one), or an archive page (archive.php) - each of these pages has a loop containing the call “the_content”. Anytime you see “the_content” in the loop - it’s a PHP call to get “full posts”. In other words, code that looks like this gets full posts:
<div class="entry">
<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>
</div>If you want to change that page to show excerpts instead of full posts, just change “the_content” to “the_excerpt” like this:
<div class="entry">
<?php the_excerpt('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>
</div>To learn how to customize the actual “read more” text in the link to the full post, The Read More Codex Page has all the details and sample code you need.
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
This post has multiple pages...
- 10 Ways to Improve Navigation
- Page 2 - Adding Breadcrumbs to Wordpress Navigation
- Page 3 - How to Hack Ugly Wordpress Next and Previous Links
- Page 4 - Wordpress Next and Previous Links for Single Pages
- Page 5 - Wordpress More Links and Excerpts
- Page 6 - How to Achieve Multi-Paged Post Navigation in Wordpress
- Page 7 - How to Add Related Posts After Content in Wordpress
- Page 8 - How to Display the Most Viewed Posts in Wordpress
- Page 9 - How to Show Most Popular Posts in Wordpress
- Page 10 - How to Assign and Show Category Images in Wordpress
- Page 11 - Sidebar Navigation Options in Wordpress
- View All
Tags: navigation, plugin, wordpress-hacks
April 18th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Thank you very much ! I’m glad you appreciate the Category Icons plugin.
Submarines last blog post..Latest version installed but WordPress says it can be updated
April 19th, 2008 at 4:20 am
You !!Rock I Am in search of these Post ..
Thannks for putting such a nice hack Here
Thanks
Vevin.Com
Vevins last blog post..View Locked Albums and Increase Yours Fans
April 19th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Very nice demonstration of breaking a post up into multiple pages.
This is something I love about wordpress also.
I post ebooks (old non-copyright books) and breaking them up into chapters, gives a lot of pages. Adding a few keyword links back to your home page or a page you want to push in the ranks is a great trick. You provide some useful content that is unique and add some link love back to your other pages.
I usually just make a “table of contents” and paste it in the beginning of the first page or on each page. I’ve noticed google likes this. Google wouldn’t really crawl the next pages that much until I started adding this. The plugin you suggest makes it quicker and adds more functions. I’ve downloaded it and will have to play![=)]](http://www.jtpratt.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/4.gif)
I am noticing that your title tag for each of the 11 pages for this post are all the same, does the plugin allow you to change that for each page? I know we can change the heading titles, but didn’t see anything about the meta tag. . . that would be another big bonus.
thx,
Charles
PS. . .
I’ve moded one of my sites, thus the earlier comments here go to a non-site now….
If you like…if easy, you can remove my old email and name (Charles linked to whateveryoneneedstoknow). Can’t keep up with all the sites.
April 19th, 2008 at 10:55 am
I did you one short with my last comment. I found a hack I was searching for, but it seems there is quite a little bit more to be found here… so I had to say: awesome lists! I just subscribed to I’ll back for more![=[]](http://www.jtpratt.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/11.gif)
Remkuss last blog post..Premium WordPress Theme: Morning After
April 19th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
You didn’t mention the sitemap plugin by Dagon Design. I think it makes it really easy to find all your posts sorted out by category.
I wrote about it and you can see it in action on my blog.
http://www.marketing-tools-review.com/blog/2007/06/favorite-wordpress-plugin-of-the-day-3-sitemap-generator/
April 19th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Thanks for the comment, Hock. I didn’t mention that plugin because I don’t think it’s very good, and also because it doesn’t belong on this hack about navigation. That’s more of an archive page, which was Wordpress Hack #2.
April 21st, 2008 at 8:59 am
[...] : JTPRATT’s Blogging Mistakes ( here & here ), Performancing Helping Bloggers [...]
April 21st, 2008 at 11:23 am
Hock, thanks for the idea.
I checked out dagon design’s sitemap generator after seeing your comment here.
It works well for a noob like me.
I guess JT has two of us that like it![=[]](http://www.jtpratt.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/11.gif)
I just posted on JT’s other article about 404 pages. I’m using the sitemap generator on that page also. It gives everything for the lost visitor to find their way again.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Charles
Acupunctures last blog post..What are True Acupuncture points?
May 1st, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Just a heads up Breadcrumb Navigation XT, the page you linked to, is obsolete as of January, 2008. Breadcrumb NavXT replaced it. My server sometimes crashes
but you shouldn’t be seeing HTTP 500 messages. It’s probably safest to link to the wordpress.org plugin directory page for it, located at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/breadcrumb-navxt/ since that’s where I’m actually hosting it now.
May 3rd, 2008 at 6:01 pm
[...] April 19, 2008 by Johnny I was just checking out JT Pratt’s page on using the nextpage tag in WordPress. You can checkout the his post at making more money blogging wordpress hacks using nextpage. [...]
August 17th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Story of my life…
I just spent 45 minutes figuring out how to build breadcrumbs and hardcoding them into my template after using them here for the last few days. And NOW I finally get to the article with the plugin! ARGH!! I guess I shoulda done a search before delving in.
On the other hand, I’m finally starting to understand how PHP works… a little.
Aahzs last blog post..News From Netflix!
August 31st, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Cheers! I’ve been looking for a “Most Viewed” type widget plugin for WP for some time now!
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September 13th, 2008 at 1:06 am
Thanks for the tips. I like the iframes widget myself - it does eliminate some of those slow loading annoyances.
Ians last blog post..Still here
October 13th, 2008 at 1:02 am
[...] MORE each and every time they visit your blog. This article was a synopsis of my in depth article Wordpress Hack #5: 10 Ways to Improve Navigation. Happy [...]
October 14th, 2008 at 1:31 am
Thank you Thank you Thank you
Just what I was looking for.
I am using most of these plugins with success now.. amazing
Sarbjit Singhs last blog post..FMS MBA Admission 2009, Delhi University
October 29th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Thanks very much - I’ve been trying to find single post pagenavi for ages!
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