Excerpts on posts pages – ProPhoto Support

When visitors come to your blog, category archive, date archive, or other area of your website that can show multiple posts at a time, you can show each of them completely or you can choose to show a truncated "excerpt view" of them. The excerpt view of a multi-post page can show each with a title, single photo, and snippet of text, or can show each in a grid format down the page. And in either case, you can control the look & layout of the pieces of each excerpt type.

Why use excerpt views?

Excerpt views serve a few purposes.

Excerpt views give a condensed list where readers might want to scan quickly through many posts (esp. your archive and search results page types) saving time.
Excerpt views reduce the number of images which must load, speeding up the loading time of the page.
Excerpt views can help you analyze your site traffic because visitors must click to view a blog post in-full. You can track which types of posts get the most views.

Enable or disable excerpts

You can toggle excerpts on or off within any layout you use for pages that feature multiple posts at once, such as your blog posts page type, your categories page type, etc. To enable or disable excerpts on a multi-post page:

Customize the layout while viewing a page that shows multiple posts.
Click to edit the settings of the WordPress content module found in your layout.
In the popup, click the Excerpt styles tab along the side.
Click to check or uncheck the option Show excerpts on blog posts pages at the top.

Here is a demonstration:

How do I use excerpts differently on certain page types?

If you want to enable/disable this option for different parts of your blog, you can create separate layouts to assign for each unique view. This way you are able to enable excerpts on some pages and disable it on others. For example, if your main blog page should show posts in-full without excerpts, but your category, author, tag, and monthly archive page types should use an excerpt view, you can setup a layout where excerpts are on and one where they are off, like:

"Blog pages" layout - excerpts turned OFF
"Excerpts pages" layout duplicated from the "Blog pages" layout - create a unique copy of the WordPress content module with excerpts turned ON

Then, you can see our Apply layouts to pages guide to learn how to apply each layout to your page types in the Layouts area of ProPhoto. You might use the "Blog pages" layout for WordPress Pages > Blog posts page and the "Excerpts pages" for Archives > All archive page types as seen in this side-by-side example:

... giving you this layout assignment result:

Of course, you can set up as many layouts as you need for different purposes, and they can have any names you want. Again, see our Apply layouts to pages guide to learn how to apply layouts.

Standard excerpts style

The standard excerpts style will provide a shortened version of your posts, and optionally can include one photo from your post. Each post is represented individually down the page much like the normal blog, but truncated.

Standard excerpts have the option to use a small, medium, or full size image, and can place it before or after the snippet of excerpt text.

Each post title & image will link to the full post, but each post can also be followed by a "read more" link which takes visitors to the full post. You can personalize the text and the styling of this link to your preferences.

If you need something fancier than a text link, you can alternately choose to use a "graphic" and upload an image or pick a ProPhoto Tile. This gives you the flexibility to create a unique button appearance and a tile can even have hover effects.

Grid excerpts style

The grid excerpts style will provide a thumbnail for each of your posts along with the title, description text, and a "read more" link or button. Each post is represented individually with a thumbnail, and the title and text can be shown below the thumbnail or overlaid when you hover or tap the thumbnail. Here is an example of the text below style:

After enabling excerpts in your content area (explained above) you can click to choose the grid style in the Excerpt settings tab:

When the excerpts option is enabled to show in a grid style, you will notice a Grid excerpts tab along the left which you can use to set different options for your excerpt grid, including:

number of grid excerpts per page
grid style
grid layout
gutter/spacing between grid items
max number of columns
size controls for grid items

Each of these controls affect what your grid looks like on the page - especially the grid style you select, since it will apply background color, heading and text font styles, "read more" link/button appearance, border line, and other appearance settings. After you have enabled excerpt grids for your blog layout, visit the Elements > Grids screen in the visual builder to change other appearance settings for the grid style you use for your excerpt grid.

Change the style of excerpt grids

You can create multiple grid styles in Elements > Grids > Styles. Your excerpt grid settings allows you to pick one of these styles. So to edit the look of your excerpts grid, edit the applied style or create a new one and select it for excerpt grids.

Control the excerpt text

By default, the text content in your post is used to automatically generate the ‘excerpt’, but you can override this on a per-post basis with any text you want.

Using the WordPress Excerpt box

Fill in some alternate text in your "Excerpt" box within the editor screen, and your alternate text will be used instead of the content of your Post.

If you do not see this excerpt box, click the "Screen Options" tab at the top-right of the post editor screen, and verify that "Excerpt" is enabled, like this:

Adding text to this box allows for showing more excerpt text what will show by default so it's a nice way to make sure your excerpt ends when a sentence ends. ProPhoto Grids have a maximum excerpt length of 120 characters, although actual word count may vary based on the font style and the size of each grid item.. Experiment with your excerpt text to get the result you need.

Using the WordPress "More Tag"

When excerpts are not enabled, the "Insert More Tag" button can be used to insert a 'break' in any Post, limiting the amount of text/content shown on your blog. This effectively gives you excerpt control on a per-post basis. When excerpts are enabled, the "Insert More Tag" button can be used to reduce the amount of text used for your excerpt.

This button will act much like a 'page break' common in word processing software, but the line seen in the editor content box will not be seen in the final post - it simply shows you where the excerpt version of your Post will stop. Using this feature, you can show a certain number of images or a certain amount of text/content from you Post, while other Posts show completely.

Select excerpt images

The excerpt image comes from an image that has been set as the featured image for the post. If a featured image has not been selected then the first image that has been uploaded and inserted into the post will be used. Your featured image does not have to be actually inserted into that post. As such, it is possible that your excerpt image is not an image that is in the full content of the post.