How To: Customize More tag in WordPress

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WordPress is one of the most popular blogging software today. One of its biggest problems is duplicate content creation. It has been a major concern, and was noticed by WordPress developers. They added a new feature, whereby you could show just part of the post on pages other than post-page, by using the HTML comment <!-more–>. You do not have to get your hands dirty by adding the code – just place the cursor where you want the post to be truncated, and click the more tag in the row of buttons in post-editor.

The more tag inserts a link to the post at the place where the post is truncated. The default anchor text is quite boring – you would see the same text on a few million other blogs. This can be customized to your taste, and is as easy as sipping tea(if you don’t like it, drink coffee/beer).

Let’s do it

Here are the steps to customize the more tag:

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  • In your theme files, open up index.php in any code editor, like Notepad, Notepad++ or Metapad.
  • In it, find this bit of code (use Find function):
    <?php the_content(); ?>
    This code may vary depending on the theme. However, it will contain the parts <?php the_content
  • Replace that code with :
    <?php the_content("(More...)"); ?>
  • (More…) is the text that will be displayed. To customize it, replace the parts in bold to whatever you want.
  • Save the file and upload it to your server.

That’s it. Hopefully, now you’ve got the text that you want. Wasn’t it easy? I told ya’ so…

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§ Comments
  • Ashwini says:

    Is it also called expandable post summary?

  • Nirmal says:

    I Would suggest you to use Excerpts in front page rather than More. Both does the job, but still excerpts does it better.

  • Sumesh says:

    @Nirmal: Actually, I use neither more tag nor excerpts. I use Evermore plugin . It is similar to excerpts, but the advantage is that it does not cut off posts indiscreetly, as in the middle of a paragraph.

    @Ashwini: I believe you are talking about expandable post in Blogger. This is different – only applicable for WP. It means that only a portion of the post will be shown on any page other than the single(post)page.
    Expandable post is different in that it shows the full content on clicking, and also it has full content in the source code, meaning no SEO benefits by using it.

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