Best Way To Support Excerpts On Main Page

Hi @bdam55,

Hemingway still uses content.php for output on single posts and pages, so your previous solution should still work post 2.0.0. I just did a quick test in my local development environment with the latest version of Hemingway to make sure.

— Anders

Thanks Anders. Yup, all I had to do was re-do what I did previously: copy the new content.php file and overwrite that section. Not hard to do but I was just wondering if there’s a better way to do this that doesn’t essentially overload the entire content.php file. The answer may just be ‘no’ which is perfectly fine, I just wanted to make sure I’m doing it the ‘right’ way.

@bdam55 Awesome. You could add a function hooked into the_content filter to your functions.php file, and add the following conditional there:

if ( ! is_single() ) return get_the_excerpt();

I haven’t tested it, but I think it should work. And agreed – it’s always preferable not to overwrite template files unless it’s absolutely necessary.

— Anders

Thanks for the suggestion Anders. I tried a few variations this evening but any use of get_the_excerpt() or the_excerpt() seems to send the site into a death-spiral. Even when including the in_the_loop() and is_main_query() conditionals.

I suspect some kind of recursion is going on creating an infinite loop. After 10 seconds or so it loads the first post title/excerpt but then times out.

I had some luck just modifying the $content string but that quickly turned into ‘reinvent the WP wheel that creates an excerpt’. I might give it another shot at some point and if I do I’ll post it here.

Thanks again,
Bryan

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by bdam55.

@bdam55 Yeah, I gave it a try this morning as well without much luck. I’m assuming get_the_excerpt() hooks into the the_content at some point, causing the loop, so you can get around it like this:

function theme_filter_the_content( $content ) {

	if ( ! is_single() ) {
		remove_filter( 'the_content', 'theme_filter_the_content' );
		return apply_filters( 'the_excerpt', get_the_excerpt() );
		add_filter( 'the_content', 'theme_filter_the_content' );
	}

	return $content;

}
add_filter( 'the_content', 'theme_filter_the_content' );

But the resulting excerpt doesn’t match the output of the_excerpt, so you’re probably correct in that you would need to manually apply many of filters applied to the_excerpt in order to get this approach working. It’s probably not worth the hassle.

Sounds good!

— Anders