While I was working on the index, I decided I wanted to include a short excerpt instead of just making a list of hyperlinks.
We're using a custom excerpt that was too long and while the RSS excerpt worked ok, I wanted shorter and control over the "more" indicator. I could have solved this problem by adding short excerpts to every page, but that would take forever. 🙂
With a little more searching, I found instructions for creating filters and custom excerpt functions (added to the functions.php file).
This line goes into your template file:
<?php my_excerpt('excerptlength_index', 'excerptmore'); ?>
The function goes into your functions.php
function excerptlength_teaser($length) { return 45;}
function excerptlength_index($length) { return 29;}
function excerptmore($more) { return '...';}
function my_excerpt($length_callback='', $more_callback='') {
global $post;
if(function_exists($length_callback)){
add_filter('excerpt_length', $length_callback);
}
if(function_exists($more_callback)){
add_filter('excerpt_more', $more_callback); }
$output = get_the_excerpt();
$output = apply_filters('wptexturize', $output);
$output = apply_filters('convert_chars', $output);
$output = '<p>'.$output.'</p>'; echo $output;}
?>