Wordpress How-To : Week 1 – The Excerpt

I’ve decided to make some changes to the blog. One is to write a weekly series of “Wordpress How-To’s” . Every monday I’ll try to find something interesting about Wordpress and write about it . Ok…now let’s begin.

Week 1 : Wordpress Excerpt – how to limit the number of words displayed

The excerpt displays the first 55 words of a post…a “teaser” if you like.It’s usually used on front pages of blogs and online newspapers . Unlike the_content() , the_excerpt() does not show a “Read More” link after the text …this is replaced by [..] .

Today we’ll learn how to change the number of words displayed by the excerpt.Let’s say that you don’t have the space to show the first 55 words of a post/article and you would like to show only the first 25.This is how you do it :

First of all you’ll need to open the functions.php file of your theme and add these following lines:

<?php
function string_limit_words($string, $word_limit)
{
  $words = explode(' ', $string, ($word_limit + 1));
  if(count($words) > $word_limit)
  array_pop($words);
  return implode(' ', $words);
}
?>

Then add this where you want the excerpt to be displayed :

<?php $excerpt = get_the_excerpt();
 echo string_limit_words($excerpt,25);
?>