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.
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.

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
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