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Tips & Tricks

Display the_excerpt only if there is text

Have you ever wanted to display the excerpt only if you write one? A simple couple lines of code can display the_excerpt any where you like.

Published

3 months ago

on

In my new theme, I am using this coded trick to display the excerpt on a single post only if I’ve got text inside. Usually if you use the_excerpt and you don’t have one, it will fake one for you.

This is not something that I wanted to do on the single post page. So I used the following code to check if the excerpt existed.

if ( !empty( $post->post_excerpt ) ) :

Once this action is taken into account, you can factor in what code you want to out put if the post_excerpt isn’t empty.

if ( !empty( $post->post_excerpt ) ) :
	the_excerpt();
else :
	false;
endif;

The above code checks if there is an excerpt and print’s it to the screen. If there isn’t an except, it doesn’t do anything.

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2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. Tim

    May 17, 2009 at 11:39 am

    Very helpful tip. I love the flexibility of WordPress and this is one more trick to have when working out a custom content display.
    Thanks for posting this!

    Tim

    Tim´s last blog post..Disappearing Widgets – A Solution in WordPress 2.7

  2. Andrew

    September 17, 2009 at 6:10 am

    I’m trying to get this to work only
    $returns = mysql_query($query);
    $result = mysql_fetch_row($returns);
    $post_title = $result[5];
    $post_excerpt = $result[7];

    display 2 titles and not the main decription or article body, any help please?
    Andrew

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Update: Thanks to Austin from PressedWords for pointing out his trick, from the comment below.

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Disable caching of your site or post

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This will tell any bot to follow your site, index it, but prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the search results.

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Disable search engine on search pages

Published

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on

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By

A good idea when trying to get the most out of your blog is usging the meta tag to tell the web bots to search & index your site. But for good SEO you should apply this code in your header.php file of your WordPress blog.

<?php if(is_search()) { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
<?php }?>

This will keep your site from getting a hit from bots over duplicate entries. 🙂

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