[Support request] Excerpt word count

[Andy]

Hi
Under the customizer settings, I have set the Excerpt Word Count to 21 and set the read more label to display as a button, but despite this the full excerpt is still showing and no read more label or button appears. However, if no excerpt is in place then it does show the first 21 words of a post’s meta description (if created) or the first 21 words of the post if no excerpt or meta description are created plus the read more button. To show you an example if you look at the attached screenshot – https://screenshot.net/kqjdrhn – the left post (which I have created an excerpt for) is pulling in the full excerpt and not showing a read more label or button, but the right post (for which I haven’t written an excerpt) is pulling in the the first 21 words of the post’s meta description and showing a read more button. Would you know what I need to do to resolve this?

[Tom]

If you’re using the custom excerpt metabox, it ignores the excerpt count and button.

You can manually add the button like this: https://generatepress.com/forums/topic/read-more-button-for-handcrafted-excerpts/

Let me know if you need more info 🙂

[Andy]

Thanks Tom

That works nicely. My only issue is by ignoring the excerpt count, the variations in excerpt length leaves the read more buttons misaligned. Might this be a good argument for using WP Show Posts rather than category pages or is there a CSS hack that might solve this?

[Tom]

If you’re using the Excerpt metabox, the count will always be ignored regardless of the theme or plugin.

To use the count, you would need to keep the excerpt box empty and let WordPress cut off the content automatically.

[Author]

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