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.
Quick replies:
– Evermore should have no effect on feeds;
– It works with the latest WP;
– You can change the text of “(more)” by editing your theme files. I described how to do this in a previous comment, which I don’t have time to look for just now. I will try to dig it up.
I think your plugin is awesome, and not only that but created a wonderful list of alternatives. that’s cool 😉
I want to add rel=â€nofollow†but how ?
thanks
Hi Bennett,
Great plugin,
Can you please tell me how to get the title of the post with the more text the way you did it on Bennettarium
Thank you
James
Great plugin, but I think it’s broken with version wp 2.6
Great plugin! I’ve included it in my post about increasing page views at http://www.howtomakemyblog.com/how-to-set-up-a-blog/the-simplest-way-of-increasing-your-blog-page-views/
My read more links aren’t clickable??? What would cause that?
Great info — thanks.
What a great plug-in. It seems to have a bug with my version of WordPress (or maybe the theme I’m using).
When I tell the “read more” link to go on a separate line in the options area, it makes a bunch of additional paragraph tags which are visible when you travel to the full blog post upon clicking “read more”
You can see how this is happening on my blog: http://www.ribbonsofred.com/journal
Any idea why?
is there a way to exclude Create previews containing the first paragraphs of each post ?? and insert “read more after x characters ?? if that`s posible than the pluging is the best from the best, i`ve been searching for 2 hours on google … my eyes r killin` me so pls help
Renee, Evermore does create an extra paragraph tag in some circumstances, to prevent WP inserting a line break. In some circumstances (depending on the browser and the theme) this can cause extra space to appear. Looks as if you’ve been bitten by this problem.
I have a few idea to prevent this, but they will require quite a bit of testing. So I’m afraid there may be a bit of a wait before I can address this.
Betzy, Evermore does not break posts after x characters, but I think some of the alternatives I listed do that.
Awesome! Just awesome!
Just installed it.
It looks great:-)
Thanks for this great plugin. I am having one problem though.
When I try to edit the settings for Evermore, I get an error: “Cannot load evermore.php”
I’m running WP 2.7 and have 2 different blogs, both with the same problem.
Thanks!
@Jon, I think the problem can be fixed by moving Evermore out of its folder and putting it directly into the plugins folder.
I need to update my plugins to work with automatic plugin functionality of recent WP versions. I need to complete my infrastructure upgrade first. (I just got a new iMac :))
@Bennett – Thanks for the quick response. I tried moving the evermore.php file out of it’s own folder and then re-activating the plugin. And it worked! Thanks!
But….I now have another issue, and whether it’s related or not I’m not sure.
If one of my posts has an image in the first paragraph then the display of my blog home gets all screwed up; sidebars missing, background images gone, etc.
If I adjust the Evermore settings so that “more” cutoff is right before the image then everything looks good.
Disregard my last issue about images screwing up the theme. It was a table issue with one of my posts. Not related to Evermore at all. Sorry for the confusion.
All works great now. Thanks again!