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 got the plugin working after reloading it a couple of times. What a great script.
The only thing I can’t get it to do now is give a preview of my Rss2Blog RSS posts. Is this a formatting issue with my posts?
This evermore &/or less is exactly what I’ve been looking for. But, I have one problem .. my blogs are generally written like this style..
BLOG TITLE / Perm Link
some adsense code
(h2)blog title heading with link to original source, if any(/h2)
oops? I must have hit some code to omit rest of my comment….
…/continued!
So anyway – is there a way to change the plugin to insert the break after the 2nd or 3rd paragraph? Because my title and link of my source is the first line of the text area, and then I give a blank line .. it thinks it is a paragraph and there is no teaser text.
Thanks in advance.
testing .. the code I used was `
Hart — I do have a souped-up version of Evermore that I use on other blogs. This version lets you specify which paragraph the break should follow, and also handles very short paragraphs (e.g. if the first paragraph is very short, then break after the second paragraph instead of the first.)
This version (“More Evermore”) needs work before it can be released. Maybe I will have time soon to do it. Or maybe not, since I am emigrating on Friday.
Hi Bennett. Thanks for reply. If you need a beta tester 🙂 keep me in mind! This souped-up version sounds good, but if you are still working on it . .perhaps you can keep it mind that it may not be a bad idea to go past the 2nd paragraph issue, and see if you can recognize the first wordwrap instance (is that possible?). For instance, as I described .. I might have the first line as a link and secondary title, but often I might have the date, or author’s link below that 1st line and sometimes the actual text paragraph may not start until the 5th line break… Just a thought. I can’t tell where your other blogs are so, I can’t see your souped up version – but, feel free to browse my “Archive Library” and see what I’m talking about. // Take care.
Thanks Hart. What you describe is surely possible — I’ll have a look at your site and see how it can be done without making the plugin too complex. As I say, I’ll get to it as soon as I can, but at the moment I barely even have time to sneeze…
Brent, sorry for the delay; I was checking out Rss2Blog. Evermore should work with it, but it depends on what processing Rss2Blog does. If you could let me know the address of your blog then I will have a look and see if I can figure it out.
Hi Bennett .. Have you had time to sneeze yet? 😀
Sorry; still no sneeze. 🙂 No matter how many times I emigrate, it always seems to take a long time and a lot of organising… Maybe, maybe in the next couple of weeks.
No problem Bennett .. when you have time, if you have time .. I redesigned my site yesterday … so, if you click on my name and see the site .. you will see what I was talking about – having the evermore kick in after 1st paragraph … mostly titles.
Take care …// HART
Hi,
I see “Read the rest of this entry” on the main page, but not on the Category pages! It just shows “[…]” with no link. Can you help me? Thanks in advance.
If a file in your theme uses
the_excerpt(), you will see […] with no link. If it usesthe_content()then you’ll see the link, and Evermore will work. So if you have a file category.php in your theme, open it and changethe_excerpt()to
the_content('Read the rest of this entry »')()The same trick work on other files such as archive.php and even index.php.
Hi Bennet ..
I hope all is well (and Paragraph 2 or 3 capabilities is still on the ‘plate’)
Take care .. // HART
[continued] //…. or perhaps you might be willing to lend the modified version of the script as seen (i believe) on this page? http://www.thunderguy.com/bennett/2005/07/19/julius-caesar-william-shakespeare/ I like how it looks after the 2nd paragraph and ties in the title. It’s been a month almost, since your post on the 20th … it would be nice to know if you will be working on something like that in the future, or will be unable to work on something like that for a long timel, or even still – that you will never will be working on modifications of this kind … I’d hate to go back and edit over 600 posts just to make it look pretty on the cover page… that’s the beauty of using your evermore i.m.o.
Hart, the Bennettarium page you refer to uses the plain old Evermore plugin, but for that post I simply used a manual
moretag at the beginning of the third paragraph! The shortened title is done with a customised title tag from a special Bennettarium-specific plugin. I tell ya, the plugins you see here are only the tip of the iceberg!I emailed you my More Evermore plugin a few days ago. Did you not get it? Let me know.
Works great. Thanks. My only problem is that it doesn’t work with postie (email posts). Email posts show up in their entirety.
Wallee, Evermore detects paragraphs by, amongst other things, looking for consecutive line breaks. So this would be two paragraphs:
But this is only one:
Maybe adding extra line breaks to your email posts will help. If not, could you give me a link to a post so I can see the problem? Thanks!
Hi Bennett… I finally responded to your Nov 19th message via email – sorry it took so long. I did receive MoreEvermore, but it was part of the email itself. Can you please send as an attachment .txt file please? Thanks in advance! // HART