Latest version is 2.3, released on 12 February 2009.
Evermore is a WordPress plugin that automatically displays short previews of your posts on your home page. Each preview includes a link to the full post. Evermore is simple to use — just install it and it starts working straight away. If you want, you can also customise the length and appearance of the previews.
Blog home pages are often too full. By default, WordPress displays the last ten posts on the main page; visitors have to do a lot of scrolling to see if there’s something interesting. With Evermore, visitors see a short preview of each post; they can easily scan your posts, find something interesting, and become hooked.
Example
For an example of Evermore in action, see my site Bennettarium.
Installation
- Full download instructions are at the end of this article.
- Log in to WordPress Admin. Go to the Plugins section and activate Evermore
Using the plugin
Evermore has the same effect as putting <!--more--> in every post to create a short preview of the post. Depending on your WordPress theme, the previews will appear on the home page, and also the archive and category pages. By default, the preview contains just the first paragraph, but if the first paragraph is very short then the preview will include the second paragraph too. This behaviour can be adjusted using Evermore’s Settings.
All formatting and HTML tags are preserved in the post preview. If the post already has a <!--more--> in it, then Evermore ignores the post, and the <!--more--> works as usual.
Advanced usage
To stop Evermore creating a preview for a particular post, include the magic word <!--nevermore--> somewhere in the post. The magic word won’t appear when people view your post, but Evermore will see it and display the full post rather than just a preview.
To change the length of the preview that Evermore creates, log in to your WordPress administration console and go to the Settings, then click Evermore. You will see the Evermore configuration screen where you can set the following options.
- The number of paragraphs each preview should contain
- The minimum length of the preview
Sometimes, the first paragraph of a post can be very short (just a short sentence, or a picture). This option allows you to add extra paragraphs to make the preview a more reasonable length. - Where to put the “read more” link — either at the end of the last paragraph, or on a new line by itself
Evermore does not change your saved posts. If you wish to display full posts on your home page again, simply go to your WordPress administration console and disable the Evermore plugin. Everything will be back as it was.
Notes
Evermore has been tested successfully with WordPress versions from 1.5 to 2.7, and should also work with newer versions as they are released.
If you find any problems, please let me know by leaving a comment at the bottom of this page.
Alternatives
Some clever people have written other plugins that do similar things. Evermore is simple and useful, but if you feel it’s not quite right for you, you could try looking at these others.
- Auto More takes a slightly less robust approach. It actually writes the
<!--more-->into your post when you save it. This means it would be difficult to take it out later. It also doesn’t work so well with more complex formatting. But it may work for your purposes. - the_excerpt Reloaded offers a customisable version of the
the_excerpttemplate tag. You have to edit your theme to use it. - Fancy excerpt is effectively an upgrade to the
the_excerpttemplate tag. It requires no theme editing. However, it will break text in the middle of a paragraph, and it still strips HTML tags from the excerpt. - Post Teaser is like a very fancy Evermore. You can configure the number of words to include, and add an estimated reading time and a word and image count. If Evermore is too simple for your needs, try PostTeaser instead.
Please leave a comment if you know of other similar plugins.
Download
Download Evermore from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Don’t forget to check out all the other plugins available here — there’s bound to be one that you will find useful.
I write these WordPress plugins because I enjoy doing it, but it does take up a lot of my time. If you think this plugin is useful, please consider donating some appropriate amount.
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Full WordPress plugin list
- Code Markup — Quickly paste code samples into your posts -- you can even include HTML markup in the code sample.
- Evermore — Automatically display a short preview of your posts on the home page and other multiple-post pages, along with a link to the full post.
- FixBack — Ensure trackbacks and pingbacks are sent with the correct link back to your blog.
- Less — Less is no more. It has been renamed to Seemore and moved to its own Seemore plugin page.
- Plaintext — Allow your readers to download source files (e.g. PHP, HTML, ASP) as plain text.
- Safe Title — Use HTML in post titles in the default WordPress theme (or any other theme).
- Search Meter — Find out what people are searching for on your blog, so you can write what your visitors want to read.
- Seemore — Change the (more...) link so it jumps to the full post, not just the part after the link.
- Top Cat — Specify a main category for your posts, and use template tags to display posts differently according to their main category.
I’m having trouble with the “READ MORE” function no matter what I try. I installed Evermore and get the post truncated but no link to read more. http://www.bullseyecoaching.com/blog-template/
I tried just using the more function that comes with WP/Thesis but that isn’t working either. Help!
@Nancy, the trouble appears to be that your theme is displaying excerpts instead of full posts. “Read more” is never displayed with excerpts.
For assistance, you could contact your theme provider. Good luck.
Hello, thanks for this nice plugin.
But one question: Is it possible to show the standard URL of the post below the excerpt in the “Read More” link?
Instead of http://***.com/post-name/#more-1143 the link should be http://***.com/post-name/
Couldn’t really figure out how to modify the code to do this.
Thanks for any help.
@alex, my Seemore plugin does exactly what you want.
It links to the permalink plus an anchor, but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure that out if you want to use it
The Evermore plugin worked great on my front page but when I click “read more” it doesn’t take you to the rest of the post. Do you know why?
@Travis, it worked when I tried it on your site. Can you give me more details on the problem?
Thank you for the plugin! A question: Can I use it (if modified, any hints?) also for the RSS feed for cutting off each post and then use “more” to link to the original article on the web? (I need the full HTML in the feed, that’s why I don’t use the default WP functionality to display the summary in the feed. So I have chosen to have the full article in the feeds, including the images, but some of them are way too long.) Or can this be a future feature?
thanks!
Thanks for the plugin. but my problem is I see continue reading at the bottom of the post and does not open when you click on it instead this address below is what appears on the address bar.
http://blog.ictpost.net/#more-138
any help would be much appreciated.
@Chris, that’s a good idea — I think it would make a good separate plugin as it’s a much more specialised than Evermore.
@Sammy, that sounds like something to do with your theme setup. I see it seems to working now. Let me know if you still need help.
Any chance of modifying which pages this affects. It’s great, but I don’t want it to work on the homepage :-/
Thanks very much!
Christopher
@Christopher, you could edit your version of the plugin. Go to the Plugins section on your WordPress console and click the Edit button next to Evermore. Find line 67, which says “$count = count($posts);”. Add another line before it so they look like this:
if (is_home()) return $posts;$count = count($posts);
That should do what you want.
Thanks for the help, but there is an issue…
The homepage shows full posts, but so does http://www.technologybloggers.org/page/2/
I am not sure if it has broken the plugin by adding the code, as I can’t see it working anywhere…
HELP PLEASE!
Christopher – Technology Bloggers Admin Team
http://www.technologybloggers.org
@Christopher, change
is_hometois_home && !is_paged().Hi,
the plug-in is great but I’ve a problem… I’m Italian and I can’t change the word “more” with something like that ” Leggi tutto l’articolo…” ( read all the post…).
Somebody know where I can change it ?
Thanks in advance for your answer.
Christian
@Christian, the “more” text is controlled by the theme, not by the Evermore plugin. You can edit your theme’s index.php file and change the “read more” into some other text. Or if that doesn’t work, you could contact the theme author and ask for help. Good luck.
Bennett,
I’m not getting the more displayed after and I can’t figure out why,
Any help would be appreciated
Thanks
Sandy
Buy the way, Evermore does work with v3.2.1. RIght?
Love the plugin and is very useful.
I find wordpress strips the “nevermore” command out with each edit and it becomes a PITA to be continually having to go in and adjust it…
I would much prefer the {!–nevermore–} ( substituted in case its stripped out) command to instead be a check the box function from the creating the post page. Any chance it could be implemented please?
i.e.. [_] Do NOT use Evermore for this post.
Hi
I have just updated wordpress 3.3.1 Evermore no longer works.
Read more link has a 404
there is there a solution for this problem
thank you
friendly