Callandor

If you’ve been reading my blog (all two of you), you may have noticed that my front page was really long. I thought it would be simple to automatically generate excerpts and “Read more” links, but it was annoying due to a lack of documentation, so I will here.

After trying two other plugins, I settled on rss_auto_excerpt. As the name implies, it will automatically generate excerpts, and you can set various properties for them. The problem is, while there’s a nice description of each attribute and an example tag to use, no one tells you where to put it. So I did some digging, using Google and the plugin’s forum thread.

The answer (one answer) is to put the following code in your default Forms code, replacing <txp:body />:

<txp:if_article_list>
<! -- list page: display the short version -- >
<p><txp:rss_auto_excerpt paragraphs="3" showlinkwithbody="1" linktext="Read More..."/></p>
<txp:else />
<! -- article page: display the complete article -- >
<txp:body />
</txp:if_article_list>

And then the front page has excerpts and Read More links, and the permalinks have the entire body.