Adding Excerpt Summaries to Blog Roll

Ok, so I just spent the better part of three hours figuring out how to add excerpted summaries to my blog roll :(

I want to post what I ended up doing to resolve this for any of you that might be able to benefit from it. Since I can't post a training module about it, for now I'll publish it as a blog.

I started out with my blog roll on my Home Page but for every single post I had, the entire contents of the post were being displayed. It took forever to see what posts were there and if I were a user on my website I'd never scroll down to more than one or two articles because it was too much of a hassle.

I tried going to the Settings-->Reading and selecting the option to display a summary instead of the full post but it had absolutely no affect.

Next I tried going to my actual post and inserting a Read More tag and this worked somewhat but it didn't enable me to customize the excerpt that was shown. I didn't like the formatting of the blog roll and it just looked messy.

At the top of the post screen you can select the "Screen Options" dropdown arrow and in there you have an option to display the Excerpt in your Edit Post window. I went down to the box beneath the post content and there was no way to add images, headers, buttons, or anything to the excerpt. I could only add in text.

There's a Great Plugin you can install to add alot more functionality to your wordpress editing box in each of your pages/posts. This plugin in also lets you add anything to your excerpt that you can add to a normal post/page section.

The plugin you want to install is "WP Edit"

Once it's installed, you can update the Excerpt settings by going to the WP Edit Settings-->General and select the option to "Add the WP Edit editor to the Post Excerpt area."

After installing this, I was able to customize my excerpts however I wanted. I could add images, bold texts, buttons. Anything I wanted...but my excerpts still weren't being displayed on my home page! It still had the full post. I did a lot of digging and found suggestions to change the actual php code but still couldn't get it working how I wanted it.

I did a bit more digging and found the following plugin

"Easy Custom Auto Excerpt"

I installed this plugin and finally my excerpts work! I didn't have to modify any settings in this plugin for my purposes but look around in it to see what best fits your needs. I tried a number of other excerpt plugins but this one worked the very best.

If you want to check out the results you can see it on my website at

yourpostbabybody.com

I hope this will help someone! I'll definitely be coming back to it.