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’m new to WP, but started using your Evermore 2 when the regular WP “more” tag somehow kept breaking my layout (made the index.php page wider anytime it was inserted in any post…very odd). Once I turned to your plugin, all troubles are over.
Many thanks Bennett — well done!
Hai,
i wanted to use your “Less” and “Evermore” Plugins on my site. Both failed, nothing happend at all. The page is still in testing status, i use WP 2.0.3 an some plugins which are all running well. Here the list:
Transpose Email 1.2
ChenPress 3.1.1
Head META Description R1.1.2
Jerome’s Keywords 1.9
Jerome’s Keywords Manager 1.0
Lightbox 2.0 Plugin 0.6.2 Final
Organizer 1.1.0
Optimal Title 1.0
PreFormatted 2.0-rc1
WordPress Database Backup 1.7
Admin Drop Down Menu 1.3
del.icio.us widget 1.0
WhoLinked 1.0
Sidebar Widgets 1.0
i turned them all on and off – no result
I like the idea of “Less” very much. Any suggestions …
Hardy
Brilliant the Evermore plug-in is just what I was looking for installs really easy and quick very simple to use
Thanks 🙂
Hi! I just wanted to drop by and say thank you for making this plugin. We are using it at NoticIEEEro, our blog and IEEE Region 9 news centre for Latin America and the Caribbean.
I just wanted to say thanks for this handy plugin, and also I really like the layout of your Bennettarium site.
Thanks, Bertha! Yes, I designed Bennettarium before I had even heard of WordPress — it was all lovingly handcrafted. It took a lot of work to turn it into a WordPress theme, but I’m pretty happy with the result. Thanks for checking it out.
I know this post is kind of old, but I just found your plugin nice work. I noticed your example about at http://www.thunderguy.com/bennett/ shows read more and then the title of the post.
Can this be done with the Evermore plug-in?
Thank you,
Jay
Jay, You’re the second person to ask that… it’s something that needs to be done by editing your theme. For example, in index.php, change
the_content('Read the rest of this entry »');to
the_content('Read more about '.get_the_title());The exact details will depend on your theme.
Thank you, this is a great plugin. Did your suggestion and it worked like a charm!!
Thank you again,
Jay
nice plugin… 😉
I post to my blog sometimes via rss2blog. I have noticed that with your plugin it does not work if the post comes from rsstoblog, however if I manually post the plugin works fine. Also if I open a post that was posted via rsstoblog and then save it the plugin will work fine.
Do you know why or how I could fix this so that when an rsstoblog post happens the plugin will work?
Thank you.
Jay, it must be something about the way RSS2blog formats its posts. Other users have reported a similar problem. Could you give me an URL where I can see a post that Evermore does not work on? I will see if I can figure out what the problem is. If not, I will have to install rss2post on a test blog and do my own testing, and that could take a while…
The most recent posts on this blog are from RSS2Blog: http://www.answeruniverse.com
Thank you!
Hmm, can’t see anything obvious looking at the source. I’ll have to investigate more. I do have one question: do you use the Rich Editor? You said that open and re-saving a post will fix it, and this may be relevant. Let me know, and I will come back with a suggestion to help me investigate. In the meantime I will check out rss2blog and see what I can come up with.
My favourite quote from your blog is:
We do? 🙂
LOL!!! Regarding the rich text editor yes my blog is set up to use it. If this helps I am also using AutoMeta: Automatic Meta & Technorati Tags for WordPress (http://boakes.org/autometa?v=0.8) plugin to produce Technorati Tags and this plugin appears to be having the exact same issue. That is if I manually post the Technorati Tags show up, but if the post is via rsstoblog the Technorati Tags do not show up. However, with this plugin if I open it and then save it again it WILL NOT work like yours does.
A notice to Evermore users: A small number of people have said that Evermore doesn’t work with certain post tools like Postie and Rss2blog. I have put together a diagnostic version of the plugin that you can use to help me find and fix the problem. If you are having problems and would like to help me investigate, just leave a comment here and I’ll tell you how you can help. (Jay, I have already emailed you and a couple of others about this.)