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.
i edited 2 posts and home page is fine.doesnt move my sidebar
A small point. When the post is viewed in full, the gap between the first and second paragraph is considerably bigger than all of the others. Evermore places a ” tag in the code, which causes this.
Is there any way to stop this?
Many thanks.
Sorry Steve, my WordPress ate your tag. [Note to self: stop my comment system munging comments.] What was the problem again? (Don’t use angle brackets!)
Ok, it is a ‘p span id=”more-123″ /p’ paragraph tag that is placed, making a larger gap in the flow of text. Is there any way of preventing this via a hack or CSS?
Very nice Best plugin thanks thanks
In my archive.php file, I have my read more modified and inside a div. I want to do the same for the evermore read more. Where can I change that?
Oops. I was mistaken. I thought I had made the changes mentioned in my previous comment, but not on this site, so please ignore my previous post.
However, I do have a problem. When I try to change the settings of evermore, I get “Cannot load evermore.php”
gw468, they tell me that the evermore.php file should be in the plugins folder, not in an evermore folder. I will fix this isn a future release, but let me know if you are unable to resolve the problem.
Steve, this is a result of trying to cater for all the possible ways people can format their posts. I will try to come up with a solution.
That was it. I moved the evermore.php file out of the evermore folder and all is fine now. Thanks.
evermore works really fine, but one problem on my blog:
I type direkt inside a post but nothing happens.
on the frontend you see the post, cutted after 200 words and you can see with just one “-” …
what happened here? can somebody help?
sorry i have used php-code and it doenst show.
so again:
I type direkt inside a post !–nevermore– with “” but nothing happens…
I’ve got a problem with my new Theme… The read more-link doesn’t show up 🙁
Any idea?
Evermore works great but I like Post Teaser even better. Thanks alot for the plugin.
Hello,
I’m wondering if the Evermore plugin is known to affect RSS feed length. In the blogs where I have Evermore enabled, I can only see excerpts when I look at RSS or Atom feeds. Oddly, it is not the same length as the excerpt specified in the Evermore options. In the WordPress options, I have specified that Full text feeds should be shown. Any ideas on this?
Thanks
Jonathan
Bennett,
Your evermore plugin for wordpress is fantastic.
Thanks for this very nice plugin.
Alex , Argentina 🙂
Is this plugin still work for the latest version of wp…?..
I think i need this one..to improve my ugly style blog…LOL…
Thanks…
Hey mate,
Great plug-in! Would you be able to shed some lights as to how to change the actual text of “(more…)” to something else like how you did it on your site?
I want to change it to “Read on… ” or something.
Cheers,