In How To Use Excerpts – Part 1, we learned why and how to use excerpts in our posts. At the end of that post, I said:
If you have entered your excerpt and updated your post and the excerpt is not showing up on your homepage, archives or sidebars, that’s because you’ll need to configure a few things in your site settings and widget settings. It’s simple and I will cover that very soon in part 2.
Well here we are! Part 2.
Featured Post Widgets
Lets start with our homepage and sidebars. If you look at the homepage of SYNAPTIC I, you will see a section titled “Latest Posts”. This section shows an image, the Post Title, Post Info (date, author comments) and the excerpt. The theme I am using at SYNAPTIC I is the StudioPress News theme. It offers quite a few areas (widget containers) where I can place a Featured Post widget to show content. In this case it’s called “Home Middle Left”. Your theme will have a variety of widget containers to chose from. All you need to do is decide which one will show your Latest Posts.
Surf to Dashboard / Appearance / Widgets
Look on the right hand side and you will see a list of available widget containers. Open the container you want to use. Now, from available widgets, grab your Genesis Featured Posts widget and drop it into that container.
Configure the widget to your liking and be sure to tell the widget to show excerpts (see arrow). Save your widget. Your homepage or sidebar (depending which widget container you used) will now be showing excerpts.
Content Archives
When you publish a post, WordPress automatically builds “Content Archives” for your posts based on categories, tags and authors. If you click on the category, you will see the archive for it. Click on a tag or the author name and you get the same thing.
Example: Surf here for a moment (I will open these links in new tabs/windows so you don’t lose this article). Example archive for the category “wordpress”
How these are displayed is controlled by the Content Archive settings.
Surf to Genesis / Theme Settings
Scroll down until you see Content Archives. Here you can select excerpts, what size image to show (or not) and what your navigation should look like. When you are done, be sure to click on Save Settings.
How Many Posts To Show
If you scrolled to the bottom of the wordpress archive I linked to above, you will have seen five posts and then a nice numeric navigation at the bottom that allows you to go to the next 5 posts in the archive.
The number of posts shown in your archives is controlled by a setting in the Reading Settings.
Surf to Dashboard / Settings / Reading
Select the number of posts to show in the “Blog pages show at most” setting (see arrow). Mine is set at 5. If I changed it to 10, then it would apply this setting to all of my Content Archives. Remember to click on Save Changes.
So there it is. I hope that this is pretty straightforward. If you have any questions at all, please ask them in the comments below 🙂
Happy blogging!
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