Many search results have no excerpt

Do you have the cache enabled? If so, try disabling it.

In the Historic Centre of Rome example, does the word “Roman” appear in the post content?

Cache is not enabled.

The word ‘Roman’ is in the post many times. Just as it is for other posts that do have the excerpt showing.

All of my content is in custom fields by the way, all have been added in the settings (this should not be an issue as it only effects some entries)

Well, that’s the thing – it’s not in post content, it’s in custom fields, and Relevanssi doesn’t really handle building excerpts from custom fields that well.

It works fine for about half of the posts. What could be stopping it from building an excerpt from the other half?

I am guessing this is related to the above issue, but the length of the built excerpt is not changing either when I change the variable in the settings. Looks like its now fixed. Will try to reinstall.

I see what is happening. It is indexing all custom fields, but it cannot create the excerpt from them, it can only create the excerpt from the actual post excerpt, so if there are no target keywords in the excerpt, the displayed snippet cannot be shown.

Solution: turn off snippets as they are broken for custom fields.

Question: If I was a paying customer would you fix this? Or is it already fixed in the paid version?

This is something that is on my to-do-list, as you’re not the only one who wants it. I’ll add it to the 1.6 version of the Premium version, I’ll have to see if it’s going to happen in the free version.

Heh, I started to add the fix to Relevanssi and I noticed I had already fixed it.

Relevanssi has a filter ‘relevanssi_excerpt_content’. You can use it to add the custom fields you want to the content that excerpts are made of.

See this knowledge base entry for how to activate the filter. Then just add the custom fields you want to the $content value the function returns, and you should have working excerpts.

This filter is available in free version.

Great news. I am not a coder so can you tell me where this filter goes and where to put the custom fields names. Thanks

Looks like you found the example code somebody did. Just add that to your functions.php.