dianabyron

I spoke too soon…. some weird characters have appeared in my widget…. got to do a full checkup now….

YES! I took your suggestion, and made a new Dreamweaver file with the same code in it, uploaded that, and bingo! I got my 100-word excerpt length.
Alchymyth, big thanks for sticking with me and guiding me on this journey!

I just used your code from the pastebin (the second one, as the first one looked like mine), and got:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_FUNCTION in /home/diann/public_html/wp-content/themes/twentytwelve-child/functions.php on line 8

Gee…..

I’ll give that a go, thanks.
Although I have Dreamweaver, I tend to only use it to see line numbers.
I can’t enlarge the text, can’t zoom in, can’t colour it, and I find it a strain on the eyes trying to read it. Whereas TextEdit gives me all those functions. I will just have to keep an unedited copy that I can open in Dreamweaver when I need to, and use this one to make the final changes and upload.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about that….
I reckon, as I said, I’ll just trust, and get on with my site building.
I’m going to bow out of this post for now, so best wishes to you and thanks for all your help. Pat to your puddy!
D

Thanks Catacaustic, I do have some spare domains parked, and I could put them as add-ons under my primary domain, and do backups to them to test them out….
Is that little tabby puddy-cat under the orange blanket your very own catacaustic?

I have the tar.gz zip files that cpanel full site backup produces, that I download to my hard drive when I get the email notification.
Sounds too complicated and time-consuming testing them. I’ll just have to do it often and trust.
I also BUP my wordpress files manually, but they are easier to test.

I AM using cpanel backups. But all I want to do is to “restore” it somewhere OTHER than my website so I can see if it works. That simple.

No I’m not restoring a backup from cpanel. At least, if I understand you correctly, I’m not wanting to restore over the top of my website as it is (which is fine). I want to open the backup somewhere that it WON’T restore over the top of my current site, so I test if it works properly. Someone once said you can do offline tests of your backups. That’s what I’d like to do, or anything totally away from my current website so it won’t muck it up.

Could you please send me the exact, complete functions.php code that you have in your Twenty Twelve for me to try?

I did that. No problem with plugins.

Oh well, thanks, I guess I’ll have to keep using it until I either find one that works or figure out how to write my own!

Here is the full code of the child theme functions.php.
However in testing, I discovered something that was causing the parse errors.
In Text Edit I had coloured some text to be able to see groups in the strings easily while editing. Then when the file was converted to a .php, although I could not see any change in the code when opening it with Text Edit, if opened with Dreamweaver (to show line numbers) there was a ton of font markup. So I got rid of that, and now the functions.php does NOT cause a parse error, the site loads OK
BUT the post excerpt length hasn’t changed!
So that 100 in there is not making any difference. Is there somewhere/someway else that the longer post excerpt length has to be specified?
Thanks for helping, Alchymyth

<?php
function twentytwelvechild_custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
	return 100;
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'twentytwelvechild_custom_excerpt_length', 100 );

function twentytwelvechild_new_excerpt_more($more) {
       global $post;
	return ' <a href="'. get_permalink($post->ID) . '">Read the Rest...</a>';
}
add_filter('excerpt_more', 'twentytwelvechild_new_excerpt_more');

?>

Tried it.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/diann/public_html/wp-content/themes/twentytwelve-child/functions.php on line 13

No-one can see anything wrong, but it just doesn’t work. I’m back to just the parent functions.php for now. But I really do want to make the post excerpts longer!

Is the code OK as is, I mean, this is the entire functions.php content in the child theme. Does it need anything else in order to work in conjunction with the parent theme?