Latest version is 2.4, released on 10 September 2015.
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.
Thanks for the plugin. I use it on my site http://blog.taragana.com/
I really like this one! It does the job very well and I’m using it on my site.
One suggestion: when a reader clicks through (more …) on my main page and is taken to the complete post, is there some way of having the title at the top of the screen, rather than the next line of text to be read?
It seems more intuitive to me, for a reader to find his or her place at the beginning of the second paragraph and continue reading. Right now, I instinctively ALWAYS scroll up to check where the target has left me. just a thought … maybe for an option in v2?
Andrew, that’s a good point. The normal WordPress “more” function has this same problem also. I’ve have a look into it, and I know how to fix it. I will write a plugin to disable it — this will work in Evermore and in the normal WordPress situation.
I’ll keep you posted.
I’ve written a plugin that makes the (more…) link display the whole article rather than jump straight to the rest of the post. You can use this plugin alone, or combine it with Evermore for twice the excitement. Details and download are on the Less WordPress plugin page.
I got a broken blog when I tried your plugin, the reason was a no being closed. The was generated by the WYSIWYG plugin (in order to align center some text) filled with s, your plugin just found the first and added the tag omitting the closing .
Maybe it is just a matter of changing the order of the regexp, but it is late and I am sleepy. Maybe I’ll be looking at it tomorrow.
The ticket system looks broken.
AnÃbal, thanks for the feedback. Sorry I wasn’t able to test it against every other plugin — I wasn’t expecting any conflicts.
It looks as if WordPress has garbled your comment. Could you redo it without using angle brackets? For example, use
[p]instead of<p>and it should show up better. I need to rejig my comment system to handle code better. Maybe I will adapt my Code Markup plugin to handle comments.Yes, that ticket system doesn’t seem very stable unfortunately. I appreciate the time you spent helping me find this problem.
Thanks for the great plugin. I use it to maintain my blog: http://www.jalansutera.com
Thanks for this very useful plugin! I just have one problem. After clicking on a date on the calender some page-URL ?m=20059823 is opened and the posts of that date are shown. But unfortunately in that case evermore is not used. The full posts are shown.
What went wrong? Thank you in advance
noriyasu, thanks for the feedback. Well, I’m afraid it works just fine for me when I set up my test blog like this. So let’s try to figure out what’s different about yours. First, it would be helpful if you would give me the URL of the date archive page where the problem occurs.
Second, what theme are you using? The default WordPress theme uses excerpts instead of full posts on archive pages, so Evermore will have no effect in that case (you can change this by changing
the_excerpttothe_contentin archive.php if it exists).Otherwise, try adding a manual “more” to one of the posts, and see if that post shows up abbreviated or in full. This will help point me in the right direction.
Thanks for using Evermore!
Hi there, that’s a great script, but I have jjust a question.
How can I change a words “Read the rest of this entry »” ?
Because I never find it.
Can you help me?
thanks 🙂
Marco, you can change this by editing your WordPress theme. For example, if you’re using the default WordPress theme, these files are in
wp-content/themes/default/.Edit the file
index.php. You’ll see the text “Read the rest of this entry »”. Change this to whatever you want.You may need to do the same thing in other files too if you’re using a differnet theme. Good luck!
thank you so much, I didn’t see it 😀
I’ve activated the evermore plugin, but nothing happens. I am testing it with rss feed posts generated by Rss2Blog.
I copied all the file text into Notepad and saved it as evermore.php using ‘save as file type’ = all files. Is this correct?
First–thank you–your plugins rock! 😀 I do have a question, however…
I’m noticing that on the Archive pages, instead of getting a “Read the rest of this entry »” link, I get an […] and no link…
Is this the expected behavior? Is there a way to change it so that I get the “Read the rest of this entry” on the archive pages as well?
Thank you again! 😀