WordPress Excerpt is a summary of your content. In this tutorial I will show you how to preserve HTML formatting for the automatically generated excerpts without the need of a plugin, and also choose what HTML tags to keep. For a manually typed excerpt, WordPress will keep all HTML formatting you have included in the excerpt. Also in this tutorial, I will show you a different way to change the excerpt_length and the excerpt_more filters.
This tutorial is the second part of my previous post: How To Improve WordPress Excerpt Without a Plugin.
The relationship between the Manual Excerpt and Automatic Excerpt is this: When a post has no manually typed excerpt and the post template uses the the_excerpt() tag, WordPress will automatically generate an excerpt by selecting the first 55 words of the post followed by the unlinked ellipsis “[...]”.
What about a Plugin? Yes, there are plugins that customize WordPress automatically generated excerpt. But haven´t you read my previous post about the disadvantages of unnecessarily adding plugins to your theme?
Manually Typed Post Excerpt
For a manually typed post excerpt, WordPress will keep all HTML tags you included in your excerpt. If you don´t know where and how to add a manual excerpt, read the section “How To: Manually Add a Post Excerpt” in my previous tutorial.
When using the manually typed excerpt, WordPress does not automatically provide a link to a page containing the full post. To generate a link at the end of the excerpt, read the section “How To: Manually Add a Post Excerpt” in my previous tutorial.
Automatically Generated Post Excerpt
In WordPress, if you do not provide a manually written excerpt to a post, WordPress will display an automatically generated excerpt. The problem with that, is WordPress will, by default, display the excerpt with the first 55 words of the post´s content, an un-linked ´[...]´ string at the end, and with all HTML tags stripped from the excerpt´s content. This makes the excerpt one long text paragraph without any line breaks.
In this tutorial, I will show you, how to overcome these shortcomings, and how to preserve all (or some) of the HTML tags in your auto-generated excerpt. All these changes are done in your theme´s functions.php file. Here is How:
Preserve HTML Tags in the Excerpt and Other Settings
Open the functions.php file located in your current theme folder and add (copy and paste) the following code. You can edit lines 22, 25, and 28 accordingly:
