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Michael D. Pollock is the founder of Solostream. He's a geek-at-heart and a small business veteran with over 12 years of in-the-trenches sales, marketing and entrepreneurial experience (he mistakenly thinks he may soon have it all figured out).

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How to Write Posts With WP-Magazine Theme

August 6th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

Don’t let the title of this post fool you … I’m not meaning to insult your intelligence when I imply that your DON’T know how to write a post with WordPress (I’m sure you do). It’s just that there are a few features built into WP-Magazine Theme, and it’s worthwhile to tell you how to get the most out of it.

If you look at the home page of this demo site, you’ll see that all the posts - including the featured posts at the top - display a post introduction (or excerpt) rather than the full post itself. It’s the same on the category pages, archive pages and search results pages. Then, when you click through to the individual post, you get the full post content along with comments and other information. The reason you posts are presented that way is because WP-Magazine Theme is designed to use the post excerpts rather than the post content.

Since the theme is set up to us excerpts, the trick is to tell WordPress how to create the excerpt the way you want it rather than it’s own way. Without any other instructions, WordPress will create the excerpt on it’s own. Here’s what it does …

Wordpress Codex: “If you do not provide an explicit excerpt to a post (in the post editor’s optional excerpt field), it will display a teaser which refers to the first 55 words of the post’s content. Also in the latter case, HTML tags and graphics are stripped from the excerpt’s content.”

So the solution is simple … Use the Excerpt field on the Write Post screen

Whatever you place in the Excerpt field is what will be displayed as the post excerpt on your home page. And keep in mind, you will need to add some HTML to the Excerpt field if you want it to be used in the excerpt. Otherwise, WordPress strips out all code including HTML. For example, lets say you want your post excerpt to be displayed just like this:

This is the post introduction. I want to include a link to this site, and this site.

In that case, here’s exactly what you’d need to place in the Excerpt field:

This is the post introduction. I want to include a link to <a href="http://www.wp-vybe.com">this site</a>, and <a href="http://www.wp-vybe.com">this site</a>.

If you need some help with the HTML code, you can write your excerpt in the normal post editor, then click the HTML view tab, and simply copy the HTML code from there.

As a side note, some folks have inquired whether they can include video in there post excerpt. The answer is yes, you can … you just need to place the code for the video in the Excerpt field.

There Are 11 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Craig on 16 August 2008:

    Mike, this theme rocks, rocks, and rocks..! Thank you so much for developing a great theme. This theme works perfectly with my WordPress blog. It’s so easy to use and full of features! Thank you for all the sel-help tutorials and your support. I absolutely recommend this theme for anyone… Congratulations for creating a fantastic theme. I also totally love your new Wordpress Theme the WP Vybe. Man you rule!

  2. Comment by Scott on 21 August 2008:

    Contact page/form how-to —
    Michael, can you provide advise or create a tutorial on how to add a contact page or form? Thanks.
    (I know you created an AVI available through Solostream.com, but I can’t access it via either my Mac or PC even after I downloaded some extra video player apps to try to open the AVI’s unknown codec.)

  3. Comment by Dave Sabol on 21 August 2008:

    Hey Michael,

    I couldn’t figure out a better venue to say thank you for the great theme and let you know how easy it was to get set-up to handle my blog aggregation site. All of the bloggers on this site knowingly and willingly contribute their content and I took advantage of the themes flexible nature to create a really dynamic site. It’s still very much a work in progress but I’d love for you to take a look and let me know what you think.

    Changes that I made of note:

    First, I created an entire theme options page to allow the control of how many posts are featured, which category is used for features, and whether or not the “about” button is displayed.

    I also added in configuration options for Feedburner, Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter and Google Analytics (including whether it is placed in the header and footer to conform with other stats services). All were custom created for my purposes leveraging the services APIs. I also set up the ads (both the 300×250 and two blocks of 150×150 ads) to be configured from the theme control panel. Finally, I swapped out the use of images in posts for the use of gravatars to give full credit to the post authors. If you are interested, I’d be more than happy to give you a “behind the scenes” look.

    Finally, I also created a custom feed generator that gives readers the options to configure a custom feed for only the authors they are interested in. http://www.alistbloggers.org/custom-feed/

    I/we launched the site this past weekend and the reception has been outstanding…I owe a great deal of credit to your theme…largely because it allowed me to focus on some of the more technical aspects of the site.

    Thanks again!
    Dave

  4. Comment by Michael Pollock on 22 August 2008:

    >>>>> Michael, can you provide advise or create a tutorial on how to add a contact page or form?

    Simplest to just use a plugin such as
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-contact-form/

    Or this one one if want something a little more extensive:
    http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/secure-form-mailer-plugin-for-wordpress/

  5. Comment by Soreng on 18 September 2008:

    Looks nice.

  6. Comment by SamB on 23 September 2008:

    Thank you, This is great for me :D.

  7. Comment by abby on 6 October 2008:

    this theme is great :) thank you for sharing this to us

  8. Comment by Joshua on 10 October 2008:

    Hey Michael,

    I’m wondering is there a way to get the catagories off of the header page. You know the part right under the title? I had a total of 20 catagories and they started to run off. Also is there a way to choose what “page” you want to appear on the header part? for instance the about page, product page, donate and etc?

    For instance, I was using a different template before and had a total of 15 “pages”. Well due to all those pages they started to run off the screen and make the template look awful. Also my title would not fit within the space given to me. It started to run off. Any help would be great. Also does adsense work with this site?

    I like the template, but any help would be great

  9. Comment by Joshua on 10 October 2008:

    One more thing Michael.

    Is there a way to make it where there is more room to type the title and tag without it overlapping the catagory section, which I would like to get rid off at the top either way. In other words move that catagory bar down a few so i have more room for pages and title of blog and tag line.

  10. Comment by Alistair Barnett on 12 October 2008:

    Hi Joshua,

    For excluding categories, please see this forum post: http://www.solostream.com/forum/index.php?topic=61.0

    For pages, see http://www.solostream.com/forum/index.php?topic=59.0

    For information on Google AdSense, see http://www.solostream.com/forum/index.php?topic=50.0

    I’ll forward your “more room to type the title and tag” comment to Michael.

  11. Comment by Alistair Barnett on 12 October 2008:

    Hi everyone,

    If you are looking for support, please visit our forum at http://www.solostream.com/forum/ for immediate answers to your support questions. Otherwise, there will be a delay in answering your support-related comment if left here.

    If this doesn’t apply to you, feel free to comment!

    Alistair

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