I was building my current version of my website out today and one of the items that I had to search for was the ability to change the length of my post excerpts, A post excerpt is basically a preview of your full content of your post which by default is set to about 55 words unless your theme alters this. The reason an excerpt exists is so that you as a reader can decide if this is something you want to read about when going through the preview, you then can click read more to go to a full page view of the entire post/article. The process is really quite simple and only contains a few lines of code:
The Code:
To alter the length of your Post Excerpt, navigate to your WordPress Dashboard, then go to Appearence, then Theme Editor, then choose the ”Functions.php” file.
One inside of the Functions.php file, you should navigate to the bottom and paste the code listed below:
function custom_excerpt_length( $length ) { return 200; } add_filter( ‘excerpt_length’, ‘custom_excerpt_length’, 999 );
This code essentially tells your WordPress Theme to display 200 words of text instead of 55. To Change the length from 200 to something else, just edit the snippet { return 200; } and replace 200 with the amount of words you’d like displayed. Although it is best to keep the excerpt an excerpt, you could put in as many words as you’d like and they would then display accordingly anywhere your theme uses “the_excerpt.”
Conclusion.
In conclusion, your best resource for any and all WordPress related documentation is the WordPress Codex. Please visit this article for more detail on changing the custom excerpt length of your WordPress theme, http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/excerpt_length.
