Enable excerpts for multiple post pages

WordPress has a feature that allows you to display your posts as excerpts instead of full posts. ProPhoto provides controls for excerpts in:

“ProPhoto > Customizer > Content > Excerpts”

An excerpt is a shortened version of your post content consisting of the first few lines of text and, if selected, a single image from that post.

Excerpts can serve a few purposes.

Excerpts can give a condensed, yet informative, list of your posts on pages where your readers might want to scan quickly through many posts (esp. your archive and search results page types) saving your visitor time.
Excerpts reduce the number of images which must load, speeding up the loading time of your pages.
Excerpts reduce duplicate content from existing on your site, which can actually be somewhat harmful to search engine rankings.
Excerpts can help you analyze your site traffic because visitors will need to click to view a blog post in-full, and this traffic can be reviewed later to tell you which types of posts get the most viewers.

Enable excerpts

enable_excerpt_boxes By simply checking boxes in the excerpts screen in ProPhoto, you can display excerpts instead of full posts on different pages of your blog. By default, only your home page will display full posts, while the rest of your pages display excerpts. You can check the boxes to choose which page types should show posts in an excerpt view – all unchecked page types will display posts in their full form.

Select an excerpt style

choose a excerpt style

You can choose to show a standard style excerpt view or an image grid style for your blog. The standard style will provide a shortened version of your post, and one (optional) photo from your Post. Each Post is represented individually down the page much like the normal blog, but shortened.

Use standard style excerpts

The grid style will show a thumbnail for each post, organized into a grid style of your choosing.

Use grid style excerpts

Control the excerpt text

By default, the text content in your post is used to automatically generate the ‘excerpt’, but you can override this on a per-post basis with any text you want.

Using the WordPress Excerpt box

Fill in some alternate text in your “Excerpt” box within the editor screen, and your alternate text will be used instead of the content of your Post.

Excerpt box in the WordPress editor screen

If you do not see this excerpt box, click the “Screen Options” tab at the top-right of the post editor screen, and verify that “Excerpt” is enabled, like this:

screen_options_excerpt

Adding text to this box allows for showing more excerpt text what will show by default so it’s a nice way to make sure your excerpt ends when a sentence ends. ProPhoto Grids have a maximum excerpt length of 120 characters, although actual word count may vary based on the font style and the size of each grid item.. Experiment with your excerpt text to get the result you need.

Using the WordPress “More Tag”

When excerpts are not enabled, the “Insert More Tag” button can be used to insert a ‘break’ in any Post, limiting the amount of text/content shown on your blog. This effectively gives you excerpt control on a per-post basis.

When excerpts are enabled, the “Insert More Tag” button can be used to reduce the amount of text used for your excerpt.

“Insert More Tag” button in editor toolbar

This button will act much like a ‘page break’ common in word processing software, but the line seen in the editor content box will not be seen in the final post – it simply shows you where the excerpt version of your Post will stop.

Using this feature, you can show a certain number of images or a certain amount of text/content from you Post, while other Posts show completely.

Select excerpt images

The excerpt image comes from an image that has been set as the “featured image” for the post. If a featured image has not been selected then the first image that has been uploaded and inserted into the post will be used. Your featured image does not have to be actually inserted into that post. As such, it is possible that your excerpt image is not an image that is in the full content of the post.