A new mod to the Excerpt Reloaded Plugin means that now you can make sure that your excerpts are properly formatted with links, bullets, paragraphs and more. Read on…
For some reason which I still don’t understand, excerpts in WordPress are displayed without any HTML formatting. So if you use excerpts on your blog home page, or in your archives, then when people see these excerpts they cannot see any links, bullets, or even paragraphs since all of these tags are stripped. Instead, the excerpt is one big lump of text.
The only solution that I’ve been able to find is Kaf’s The Excerpt Reloaded Plugin. This plugin allows you to define certain HTML tags that will be retained in the excerpts. To do this, you replace the code in your template files that call the article text or excerpt with something that looks like the following:
-
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“120” is how many characters should be in the excerpt, and the list of tags are the tags that I want to be preserved in the excerpts.
However, I’ve found that some excerpt pages have formatting problems. For example, if one of the top excerpts on a page has a blockquote, the entire page following is one big blockquote. It seemed to me that the HTML closing tags were causing the problem, but seeing as I’m no PHP guru, I didn’t know how to go about fixing this.
This is where Rob comes into the picture. Rob created a mod of the Excerpt Reloaded Plugin that preserves the closing </p> tag. He posted a comment on my original post reviewing The Excerpt Reloaded Plugin to notify me of this plugin. I tried it out, but didn’t see any noticeable improvement, and told him so. Rob went back to the drawing board and fixed up his mod somehow so that closing tags appear, making the archives look normal!
