Featured images and excerpt length

[Elaine Griffin]

Hello,
I have a client who is wanting to have a lot of control over her featured images and excerpt lengths. I have been around and around with her about it what she wants and what is possible. I've tried using featured widget amplified, and she didn't like that. Here is her explanation of what she wants:

In my perfect world, I'd have 5 posts on my home page. Each one would be truncated and show a teaser with a smaller featured image. Instead of it being just a quick teaser I'd actually like to show a chunk of the post itself, with all it's formatting and spacing, italics, paragraph breaks etc; The image would be at the top left and the text would wrap around it and extend down past the image for a couple of inches. I'd like the reader to be able to read a little bit of the post before deciding if they like it enough to click read more.

In Genesis you have two choices. You can manually truncate or you can display excerpts.

I used to manually truncate my posts. I would just pick a spot and insert a read more button. This looked great. I could make my teaser longer. It showed all my fancy formatting. It showed the post exactly as I had written it up to the point that I had inserted a read more button. The problem was, that it also showed the images that were inside the post. I always put an image at the top of my post to set a tone. So you would see the smaller featured image and then the same image in a full size right next to it. Looks weird right?

So option two is change the setting to show an "excerpt." This is what I'm doing right now. This setting strips any HTML formatting. So I have no paragraph breaks, no italics, no bolding and everything runs together. From what I have read it's to avoid having a hanging tag if the sentence get's cut off. If you look at http://joyinthemidstof.com/page/3/ Page three my post Shot at Dawn is a poem. It looks so weird because there is no formatting. When you read the teaser you lose all meaning in how I formatted the words.

Does that make sense? I want truncated posts, smaller featured images that display on one side, more control over how much text shows up, without having images show up twice.

I have read that you can insert code to filter out images from showing on the home page and manually truncate. I have also read you can use plug-ins that stop the HTML formatting from being stripped out of the post excerpt. I wonder if there is a way to give the flexibility in post excepts. If not, then I might consider changing my home page layout a bit

I'm not really sure how to give her what she wants. Any thoughts?
Thanks!
E

http://www.joyinthemidstof.com

[Brad Dalton]

You can add HTML tags back to excerpts and also increase the word limit in the excerpt using PHP code:

And HTML formatting tags

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[Anita]

Well I just provided this link a few minutes ago to someone else. Brad Dalton of WPSites.net wrote a blog on adding HTML code back to excerpts - you can check that out here - http://wpsites.net/wordpress-tips/add-back-html-tags-stripped-from-content-limit-excerpts-in-wordpress/.

He also wrote code that might work for the featured image. How it works... when you select the Featured Image, it will automatically show that image at the top of the post - which means she wouldn't have to manually add it there - http://wpsites.net/wordpress-tips/auto-set-featured-image/. The good thing about this is that - in Excerpts, that first image will not show up because it's technically not inserted into the body/content area.

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[Elaine Griffin]

Thank you both! I'm running all of this by her and hopefully we can come to agreement. I will post if I have any more questions.
Thanks again!

[Author]

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