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Like a lot of sites, mine shows excerpts of posts (and TEC events) with a Read More button. But some of the excerpts are identical to the posts, so readers who clicke “Read More” are wasting their time and get annoyed. What is the best way to hide these?
I could create a tag and some CSS to hide the Read More button. Is this the best way, or could the process be automated.
Seems like lots of people must have this problem, but I can’t find it.
Thanks,
Dan -
Hi there,
Do you mean the Current news posts section?
How did you set up the excerpt? Is it using headline block and set the dynamic content to an excerpt?
And are you using the custom excerpt for the posts?
Let me know 🙂
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I’m particularly interested in doing this in the featured posts section at https://uumiddleboro.org/#FeaturedPosts. I will worry abot Featured Events (the next section) later.
I’m not using the Headline block + Excerpt-as-dynamic content method. If that’s helpful to solve my problem, I’ll need to learn about it!
Several people create posts, so their method varies. Sometimes the excerpt is defined by putting a /more block into the body of the post or (more often) using a custom excerpt. I’d be happy to end up with a set of reasonably simple instructions for how to set the post up if you want the Read More button to disappear when appropriate. Right now an example would be the Music Director Search excerpt, which contains the whole post.
Thanks,
Dan -
Since you have several ways of adding the excerpt, I don’t have a solution, unfortunately.
I want to suggest unifying the way you guys add the excerpt, do NOT add the Read more tag and do NOT use custom excerpts, just let the headline handle it by setting a word count number, and toggle the use theme read more option, instead of using a specific button for it.
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Thank you, Ying. I’ve set up a staging site to test your suggestion, and here is what I discovered:
I misunderstood initially, thinking you meant me to use a Headline block in the post. But I now think you meant to use it on the homepage, in the query loop where the excerpts appear, is that correct?
Turns out I was using the Headline block in the homepage query loop already, with dynamic data enabled and
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Data source = Current post
Content source = Excerpt
Excerpt length = 10000
Use default more link ON
no Link source set.I removed the custom excerpt from each post and set the Headline block Excerpt length to 50. A 50-word excerpt now shows on the homepage for each post. All of each excerpt is linked to the full post.
If I turn Use default more link OFF, I see a …Read More link at the bottom of each excerpt in the editor (except for the one that is shorter than 50 words – yay!), but not on the front end.
I assume I can now style the Read More link to look like the red GB buttons I am currently using, via the a.gb-dynamic-read-more selector. Correct?
If possible, I would like to avoid excerpts that end mid-sentence. Is there a way to accomplish that?
Dan
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Good morning Ying,
Further experiments show that I seem to have some hard tradeoffs among things I want:
1. Read more link that disappears when there is nothing more to read. The GB headline block with dynamic data set to Post excerpt accomplishes this.
2. Excerpts that end where I want them to end, rather than in mid-sentence based on a word limit. The Read More block and custom excerpts both do this, but the GB headline block ignores excerpts created this way.
3. Excerpts that can contain working links (Sign Up Here!). This is really important, as it produces revenue by saving a click. Only Custom Excerpts seem capable of this.
Life is tough! Do you see any way around this for me?
Thanks,
Dan -
I may not make it clear, you will need to STOP using custom excerpt and read more tag in the content.
If you want a solution for your current setup, there is none out of the box, unfortunately!
You will need to write a custom function for that.
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Thanks, Ying,
I understand that if I want to use the GB headline/dynamic date approach, I cannot use the Read-More tag or custom excerpt. Are you saying there is some other reason not to use them?
It seems that WordPress gives users control over the length and content of excerpts, and GenerateBlocks offers the option to get rid of needless Read-More links. I may well end up using a custom function or a CSS workaround that will give me both!
Thanks as always for your help and clear explanations.
Dan
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I understand that if I want to use the GB headline/dynamic date approach, I cannot use the Read-More tag or custom excerpt. Are you saying there is some other reason not to use them?
No, I mean it won’t work with GB headline or the default GP excerpt; neither option will achieve what you are looking for if you are using 3 methods to generate the excerpt. I suggested using the auto way by stopping the custom excerpt/read more tag.
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