Full Post Content in Feeds with Home Page Excerpts (WP)

Want to deliver full post content in your feeds without having full posts on your WordPress home page? K-L Masina and The Urban Monk and I discussed the issue of full feeds, the more tag, and truncated posts by email a few months ago — K-L has requests from her readers for full posts in her feeds, but wants to maintain a home page on the blog with multiple options.

I promised to hunt down a solution, a way to separate the more tag effects on feed delivery and on-site posts. After sifting through more complex and elaborate plug-ins, I discovered an even simpler template tweak that does the trick.

Why don’t you want full posts on your front page?
It creates duplicate content, for which many SEO gurus claim Google penalizes your blog. Your most recent posts, if they exist on both the index or home page, as well as at their permalink locations, essentially exist at least twice on your site.

Multiple duplicates appear on your site, depending on your archive templates. Your archives pages are also affected by duplicate content if you aren’t using excerpts.

I want new visitors to the front page of Spiritual Blogging to see a range of recent posts to scan over and choose from — but I want subscribers to receive the full post content in either their news reader or their email.

No More !more Tag
In WordPress, if you use the “more” tag to truncate posts on your index or home page and continue on the individual or single post page, the cut-off is reflected in your feed as well — even if you select full feeds in your dashboard options.

There’s a simple template tweak that will give you:

• Post excerpts on the front page of your blog — with HTML/Images
• Archives with scan-friendly teaser text or post summaries
• Full post content delivery in your feeds

WordPress Template Edit
On your index.php or home.php template, in the section of the WordPress loop that calls your posts, replace the_content with the_excerpt

Excerpts require an additional step when creating new posts
It’s a good habit to write a post teaser to use in the optional excerpt box at the time you publish a new article. (So you don’t end up having to crawl back through all your old posts creating them later.) The excerpt is an opportunity for you to choose the compelling summary that goes along with each post, rather than having a certain number of words pulled only from the beginning of your article.

I use the excerpts for my archives as well as the home page, so that a category archive page presents a list of articles with the teaser or summary text, instead of an enormous page that seems to scroll on to infinity, with every post I’ve ever made in that category or time-period strung end to end.

“But I want my pretty images to appear on my posts…”
The optional excerpt box will accept HTML — if you want the images or thumbnails for each post to appear in the summary, simply include the image HTML code. You can also make the entire excerpt text a link, or include links within the excerpt — even give the image a link to the article itself.

Check out the home page for Slade on Blogging and you’ll see that I now have a preview of the [nine] most recent new posts, but subscribers receive the full content of the article, according to their email or feed reader delivery preferences.

Want to Capture More Subscribers? Here’s what works for me.

Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.