WordPress get_excerpt – show more words

Jan 3, 2008

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in Programming, quick & easy tips, Web Design

the get_excerpt function on WordPress shows the first 55 words of your post, striped out of any special formatting eg: links, bold, etc. I wanted to change it for a blog I was developing so I traced it back to the function wp_trim_excerpt in the file \wp-includes\formatting.php. In this file you can change the value from 55 to , in my case 100. Just change the line 786 which should look like this $excerpt_length = 55;

Please remember that this will change the default value for all you excerpts.

UPDATED: See Mike Schinkel’s comment for updated information (Thank you)

Comments

4 responses to “WordPress get_excerpt – show more words”

etestcids

October 21, 2008

Hi,
I am, John
good overall content
my site:

http://pX1qGcT4u.spaces.live.com/
RaiulBaztepo

March 29, 2009

Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language 😉
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
Mike Schinkel

April 12, 2010

Hi Alex,

Conceptually, this is a great idea. In practice, you are suggesting that someone modify WordPress’ core code which isa really bad idea. Instead, they should use a filter “hook.” They can add this to their theme’s functions.php file to do the same:

add_filter(‘excerpt_length’,’set_my_excerpt_length’);
function set_my_excerpt_length($length) {
return 100;
}

This works for WordPress v2.7 and later, see:
http://adambrown.info/p/wp_hooks/hook/excerpt_length?version=2.7&file=wp-includes/formatting.php

HTH.

-Mike
Alex Costa

April 12, 2010

Hi Mike

Thank you for the comment and improvement on the content of this post. I have added a link to your comment in the main post body.