Splitting your WordPress blog posts with ‘Read More’

Sometimes you just want to split your WordPress blog post up into a couple of paragraphs, followed by a ‘Read More’ link to the full posting. I do most of my digging in other frameworks and languages, so my WordPress customization skills are limited.  I’ll install it, throw up a theme and do some basic customizations for you. But ask for more ‘advanced’ things and I’d go digging on the Interwebs for the solutions. I landed up digging around in theme files looking for this option today, but turns out its a lot simpler to add ‘Read More’ breaks than I thought.

When writing a blog post insert a markup tag in the post to indicate ‘Read More’. In the WordPress blog editor, when editing in ‘Visual’ mode type

Alt-Shift-T, or click the 4th icon from the top right- ‘Insert More tag’. If you’re editing in HTML mode, add <!–more–> to the markup where you want the break.

Remember though – ‘Read more’ breaks are ignored in any Templates (eg a single post), and are most useful when viewing lists of blog posts (e.g. WordPress categories). For a more detailed implementation explanation of ‘Read more’ usage in content, checkout the WordPress Codex for the_content template tag. I RTFMed and it actually helped!