Customizing Blog Excerpts

Support
#1

Hey, I’m sure this question has been brought up many times in the past, but I wasn’t able to find a solution in these forums.

On my Blog page I’m in the process of trying to customize the layout of the excerpt and am running into a bunch of issues. My biggest two are as follows:

How do I include a “Read More” or “Continue Reading” link under the excerpt?

and How do I add post meta to the excerpt?

I’m currently moving over from SquareSpace where all of this information automatically showed up, yet on X Theme I cannot find any way to make this happen. Just for an example, attached is a photo showing my SquareSpace version (top) and the new one.

Please help, this is driving me nuts!

#2

Hi there,

To have a customized Excerpt for your blog posts you need to go to edit screen of each post and click on the Screen Options and check the Excerpt option:

That will show a new box at the botton of the screen which you can add custom text which will show in the blog listing page:

To be able to show the meta information of the blog post you need to enable it from X > Launch > Options > Blog > Content section:

Thank you.

#3

Hey, thanks for the info, but I made a mistake by the choice of image to use in my question. Excerpts themselves are not the issue, I don’t know why I chose an unfinished post for the screenshot… most of my other ones DO in fact have excerpts.

My issue is with the “Read More” button (it’s non-existent), and the rest of the details such as tags, categories, etc. I have post meta turned on, but nothing shows up.

#4

Disregard my issue, the problem has been resolved. I was using the Icon stack, which apparently doesn’t show post meta. I switched to Ethos and now everything is fine.

#5

Hey There,

We are just glad that you have figured it out a way to correct the said issue.
Thanks for letting us know!

Best Regards.

#6

Hey, it turns out the problem wasn’t entirely resolved.

While switching stacks did in fact solve my blog index display issue, the new stack screwed up my actual blog post layouts, so I am unable to use the new stack.

Is there a way to implement some aspects of Ethos (such as the blog index display) into Icon? On something as advanced as X Theme this must be an option…

#7

Hi there,

Unfortunately, it is not possible to mix and match parts of a stack to another one, think of the stacks to be completely different templates which may share few general aspects. If you check the theme files you will see that in the framework folder there are separate files for each stack.

I wonder what is the exact thing which you want to achieve and maybe we can help you by overriding a file from ICON stack to your child theme and give necessary changes.

Thank you.

#8

I’ve attached an image showing the three versions of Blog Index pages that I’ve used/experimented with. The to one is my least favourite, but is using the Stack that allows the rest of my site to function the way I’d like it to. The second one is with Ethos, which has a better layout for the blog index itself, but causes issues elsewhere on my page.

My favourite of the three is actually from SquareSpace, where my site is currently hosted (for the next few days yet anyway). This one is by far the most visually appealing display and includes everything I would like. I’m sure asking for a display similar to this one would be too much to ask, but I figured I’d include it anyway so you have some idea of what I’m looking for.

Thank you again for your help!

#9

Hello There,

I would recommend that you create a staging site. This is very useful because you can test drive any X updates in the staging area, do the customizations and troubleshooting without disrupting your live site. Once everything is perfect, you can easily and flawlessly proceed the update in the live site. To know how to create a staging area, please check out these articles:


Once you have the staging site, please set up the stack like Ethos stack and send the url to us. We may be able to help you format the result of Ethos stack to display like the one from SquareSpace.

Please let us know how it goes.

#10

Thanks, I’ll look into that next week some time if I get a chance. I found a plugin that somewhat seems to give me what I’m looking for and don’t really have much time right now to play around anymore with coding as the page goes live at the end of this week.

Thanks again!

#11

You’re welcome, @kerridawn.

#12

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