How to use manual excerpts in posts

In themes that support and implement it, WordPress automatically generates excerpts out of the posts’ content. These excerpts are short introductory texts lacking any kind of formatting (HTML markup) or complex structure.

However, WordPress also implements a partially hidden feature which we call manual excerpts. They give you the ability to manually type in the short introductory text that will be publicly displayed instead of the auto-generated ones.

Activating manual excerpts

The excerpt field is not visible by default in the Posts section of the dashboard. You can however enable it from the Screen Options panel:

Manual excerpts - Screen optionsManual excerpts - Excerpt option

Checking the “Excerpt” checkbox in the Screen Options will add the additional Excerpt field to the existing ones. You’ll find it just below the post content:

Manual excerpts - ExcerptBy default, pages do not have excerpts functionality in WordPress. Our Plus themes (currently Kahuna Plus and Roseta Plus) enable this feature and it can also be enabled using a plugin.

Once enabled, page excerpts behave exactly the same as posts excerpts  (and are used where pages are displayed in lists).

Displaying manual excerpts

In here the desired excerpt text or even HTML markup can be typed in. There’s no rich editor so you’ll have to manage the markup by hand. The content entered will be displayed as-is, without any additional processing or filtering, on the frontend of the site – so be wary of markup errors. Make sure to close all HTML tags that you open.

Manual excerpt - Frontend

More Tutorials This article is part of our WordPress general and theme specific tutorials series. For more useful information check out our tutorials section.

One Comment

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.