Showing part-posts on your WordPress home page: the "more" tag
Another Google-inspired quickie. 
If you have a theme that normally shows full posts on the front page and archive pages, sometimes you'll want to change that behaviour just for a single post: perhaps it's just too long for the front page, perhaps it's got material in it that you want to warn people about before it's suddenly in their face, perhaps a cliffhanger-style cut suits the style of what you're writing. That's where the more tag comes in.
One of the buttons on the WordPress new post box is labelled "more". Click it, and the tag <!--more--> appears in your text box. Once the post is published, on the home page, that tag will translate into a "more..." link, automatically cutting your post at that point. When the link's clicked, it goes to the single post page at the point in the post where the "more" tag was inserted - so your readers won't have to scroll through text they've already read.
Changing the link text
If you don't like the "more..." link text, it's easy to change. Go into Appearance > Editor, and open up index.php (you'll need to do this for archive.php and search.php too, if you have them and want them to work the same way). Look for a line similar to <?php the_content(); ?>Add the text you want inside the brackets, enclosed by single quote marks:<?php the_content(' ... read the rest of this post ... '); ?>If you want to use inverted commas in the link text, you'll need to escape them with slashes: <?php the_content('Don\'t you want to read the rest of this post?'); ?>
Alternatively, if you want different text for each individual post, edit the "more" tag each time. For example: <!--more click here if you really want to see a gross picture -->would give you link text of "click here if you really want to see a gross picture".
Removing the link text
If you don't want a link at all to the rest of the post (in which case, would you leave me a comment explaining why - most curious), you can change the the_content link in index.php etc. to<?php the_content('',TRUE,''); ?>
Posted by Sue on May 5, 2009 in WordPress.
