Post Excerpts and the More Tag in WordPress

Not only once, it has been said that displaying full posts on your blog home page, category pages or archive pages increases the chance of being penalized for duplicate content.

In WordPress, using post excerpts has proven to be a good alternative, but one that has its downsides:

• You lose control over text formatting;
• Images won’t be displayed;
• If you don’t take time to write them yourself, WordPress might not select the most appropriate fragments;
• Readers might not be convinced to further click, if the excerpt is not attractive enough.

Better Post Excerpts

If you’re concerned about your writing style, you’ll most definitely take care about how you structure your posts, where you insert images and how you write the introductory paragraph.

With these in mind, you basically got yourself a very good post excerpt, one that you should not leave to WordPress to decide when and where to cut.

The ‘More’ Tag

This is the most valid alternative to displaying post excerpts, if the_excerpt() template tag does not fit your needs.

More is what the WordPress developers call a quicktag, designed to cut-off large posts into two fragments: one that will be displayed as an excerpt and one that users will continue to read from after clicking the “read more” link. It serves as a marker inside the post so that users who come from the excerpt link, will start reading the content from that point on, and not from the beginning, again.
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How To Remove the White Space in wp_list_pages()

wp_list_pages() is one of the most common WordPress template tags. Sometimes, the little white space that some browsers add to the output of this function can create a big mess in your theme’s template, making it hard to style, especially when trying to create a horizontal list. The fix for this is quite simple and requires minimum coding knowledge, if none at all.

The Problem

The wp_list_pages() generates either a series of <li> elements containing links to all of you blog’s pages, or a full unordered list with a heading at the beginning.
The output of this list looks like this:
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WordPress Template Tags: wp_get_archives()

Welcome to our new series’ first post! The “WordPress Template Tags” series is intended to bring into spotlight some of WordPress’ less common, but very useful template tags. While the contents can’t be considered a revelation to advanced WP users and developers, it can be of big help to those who take their first steps in the amazing world of online publishing using this famous blogging platform.

But enough chit chat! Here’s our first recommendation:

wp_get_archives()

Have you ever thought of how to display a list of your most recent posts? Or a list of all posts published in the last 10 days? Or 6 months? Or 2 years?
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