This post is being submitted as part of the tutorial blog writing project over at Daily Blog Tips. If you are interested in participating, all tutorials must be submitted by midnight of January 27th, 2008.

Depending on the type of blog you run, you may at some point have an interest in only showing only a short excerpt of a post on your blog’s homepage. This could be for a variety of reasons, ranging from attempting to increase page views to trying to make your homepage more easily navigated and organized.

Another really popular place for using the post excerpt is for your archive pages, which helps you to avoid being penalized for duplicate content by the search engine spiders.

No matter what the reason is, if you are interested in switching some of your templates to show post excerpts, it isn’t very difficult to do. Go to the template you want to make the change on and find the following code:

< ?php the_content(); ?>

Depending on your theme, it may include something in the parenthesis. Change this code to the following:

< ?php the_excerpt(); ?>

This will cause your blog theme to only display the first 55 words (and strip pictures/formatting). If you’d like to add a link to allow readers to then click over and read the full post, you can instead use something like the following excerpt code:

<?php the_excerpt(__(’Continue Reading This Entry’));?>

You can of course adjust the wording to fit your personal needs.

If you’d prefer to show an excerpt longer than 55 words, or want to display your pictures and formating, you’ll have to do a little manual work. You currently have two choices:

1. Use the More tag - Once you’ve written your post, you can switch over to Code view in your WordPress Write panel, click where you want the excerpt to stop and click the More button.  (See the screenshot above)
2. Optional Excerpt field - Paste the part of the post you’d like to display as an excerpt in this field of your WordPress Write panel. It should correctly display everything in the excerpt including links and specific formating.

If you use either of these methods, you’ll notice that your feed is only displaying partial posts. If you’d prefer to have the feed display the entire post, but keep the partial post on your actual website, I recommend using the Full Text RSS Feed WordPress plugin to override this and have the feed display the entire post.

Questions?  Let me know in the comments below.

Ever wonder where Matt Mullenweg came up with the idea for what we now know as WordPress? I bet most people have wondered at some point, because at the time, the idea of starting up a business where the product would be free and everyone had access to the code was a recipe for disaster.  At the time, the concept of open source software wasn’t exactly mainstream and there wasn’t a good way to monetize it.

I was happy to discover that back in 2003, you can actually find a blog post by Matt on his blog titled The Blogging Software Dilemma, where he writes about the idea of the perfect blogging software. Here is a bit of his post:

What to do? Well, Textpattern looks like everything I could ever want, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be licensed under something politically I could agree with. Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around. The work would never be lost, as if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name. What should it do? Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?

Click over to read the rest.   You can certainly see the wheels turning as Matt began to put together when would eventually become WordPress, and almost a year later Matt updated the post stating that this idea eventually became WordPress.  Thanks Matt for seeing this idea through and to the rest of the WordPress team that has made it happen.  Your hard work has made all of our online lives better!

[via We Love WP]

Premium themes continue to be released at a fast pace and the quality seems to keep getting better and better.   Magnus Jepson has been in the premium theme game for awhile now, releasing premium themes on his own website, as well as collaborating with Adii on a Premium News theme called NewsPress.   Now it looks like he has released another theme in his “Press” series, this one called PolaroidPress.

PolaroidPress is a 2-column theme that features a randomizer that allows you to upload and use several different images for the header.   Other features include:

• Artistic background
• CSS menu
• Widget ready sidebar
• Layered Photoshop file with the multiple license pack

Here are some samples of the unique look you’ll get:

PolaroidPress Blog Page Template

PolaroidPress Single Page Template

PolaroidPress Post Page Template

You can see the variety of pictures in the headers of the above screen shots.  I also love the RSS button in the menu at the top.  You can see a live demo of the theme here.

Magnus supports his themes, offers free upgrades if any changes are made, and has very competitive prices.   You can purchase the single-use version of the theme for only $49.00, or use it on multiple websites for only $99.00. Click here to get more details!

Have you ever noticed those cute little smilies that some WordPress bloggers use to show emotions within their posts? Offering these has become quite the trend around the blogosphere.

As a user of WordPress, there are a few WordPress plugins available for you to easily offer smilies to commentators on your blog. My plugin of choice to accomplish this is the Smilies Themer plugin. Once uploaded and activated, you can then pick a smilies theme to use.

A variety of people have submitted smilies themes for this plugin, and many come in a variety of colors. My favorite was provided by Nyssa J Brown called the XPressions Emoticon Pack. You can choose from a variety of colors:

Yesterday I was excited to see a post pop up in my WordPress dashboard over on Mark Jaquith’s website announcing that WordPress has secured $29.5 million dollars in their second round of financing.   Congratulations to Automattic!  The investor this time is the New York Times so I think it is safe to say that they are doing something right.

While it may not seem like $29.5 million will go very far in today’s world, when you consider that they’ve gotten by on only $1.1 million since 2006, it somehow seems like a much bigger number.  

So what does this mean for WordPress?  It looks like Automattic currently has 17 employees.   If I was a betting man, I would bet the house that they will be hiring soon.   These employees can be used not only towards improving the WordPress software, but can also be applied towards improving the WordPress Codex, forums, or improving their efforts against fighting spam. 

Want to know more?  You can get more directly from Matt.