[Resolved] Using excerpt as meta description

[Anonymous]

Hi Tom,

Can you elaborate further on “That code doesn’t return anything if you’re not on the blog page, which will likely prevent excerpts from appearing at all.”?

[Tom]

It’s the way filters work in WordPress. You always need to return something: https://pippinsplugins.com/a-quick-introduction-to-using-filters/

In your case, you’re only returning something if a condition is true, but nothing is returning if that condition isn’t true.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Tom.

That’s clearer. I imagine that given the scope of the excerpts only displaying on a blog or search page, I presume it’s a non-issue if it is false.

Are there other sections/pages or the like excerpts are displayed?

For example, I noticed that they are also displayed in the search results page and tweaked the code as follows.

function replace_excerpt_with_content( $excerpt ){
    
    if ( is_home() || is_search() ) {
    
        $more = '<p class="read-more-container"><a title="' . get_the_title() . '" class="read-more button" href="' . get_permalink() .  '">Read More<span class="screen-reader-text">' . get_the_title() . '</span></a></p>';
        $content = force_balance_tags( html_entity_decode( wp_trim_words( htmlentities( wpautop(get_the_content()) ), 20, $more ) ) );  
   
        return $content;
    }
}

add_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'replace_excerpt_with_content', 10, 1 );

[Tom]

Archives will likely be missing excerpts with that code, and it may break some plugins.

To be safe, you can just do this:

function replace_excerpt_with_content( $excerpt ){
    
    if ( is_home() || is_search() ) {
    
        $more = '<p class="read-more-container"><a title="' . get_the_title() . '" class="read-more button" href="' . get_permalink() .  '">Read More<span class="screen-reader-text">' . get_the_title() . '</span></a></p>';
        $content = force_balance_tags( html_entity_decode( wp_trim_words( htmlentities( wpautop(get_the_content()) ), 20, $more ) ) );  
   
        return $content;
    }

    return $excerpt;
}

add_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'replace_excerpt_with_content', 10, 1 );

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the suggestion Tom.

[Tom]

No problem!

[Author]

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