Latest version is 2.3, released on 12 February 2009.
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 by clicking here. Thank you.
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.
@YoU, Evermore splits posts by paragraphs. If the picture is on a paragraph by itself then Evermore counts that as one. You can often achieve the effect you want by adjusting the minimum length of the preview.
how to change “more..” to “Read More..” ??
@Siddharth: the “more” text is controlled by the theme, not by the Evermore plugin. You can edit your theme’s index.php file and change the “more” into “Read More…”. Or you could contact the theme author and ask for help. Good luck.
Sometimes people do a post consisting of only a block text without any paragraph.
How to limit to a certain amount of characters in those situations?
@Francesco, Evermore only works on paragraphs — it is specifically designed to not break text in the middle of a paragraph. If you have different needs, try one of the alternatives listed on this page.
Hey Bennet, nice work here. Regarding Evermore functionality, do you know how I could have the redirect jump to the top of the post page instead of dropping the user off at the next paragraph?
@Ty, my Seemore plugin does exactly what you want.
How to change “more..” to “Read More..”. ?
Hi, thankyou soo much for what youdid with evermore. Unfortunately, after we installed WpROBOT, an auto poster that also grabs images from flickr, to automatically create posts, evermore doesn’t work correctly?
I know its a formatting issue…The front page of our post only shows the Post IMAGE, along with title…but no post excerpt.
http://www.DodgeChallengerReview.com
any idea’s….we’ve fiddled for a week on this
Thanks!
@Gregory, you should be able to fix this by adjusting Evermore. Log in and click Settings, then Evermore. I suggest increasing the “Create previews containing the first” number to 3.
This should work because Evermore treats the image as a paragraph. So if you set the preview to contain 3 paragraphs, then it should contain the picture, and the caption, and the first block of text.
This is it!
This is exactly what I was looking for.
Not many settings, no fin tuning. Just set ‘n forget.
I think I will use this plugin now for all my Wordpress blogs.
I already voted 5 start on wordpres.org
Thanks
Jürgen
just got to try this plugin…thanks.
your plugin is superb, really! thanks for writing it!
maybe you could improve it by including a small code that the user can paste in his template, so that the ‘read more’ text appears where the user wants it to, and not just right underneath the excerpt?
@Nele, the “Read more” text simply links to the post permalink, so you can always put a link to that in your template. (Actually it links to the permalink plus an anchor, but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure that out if you want to use it…)
Hi Bennett,
We Installed and activated the evermore plugin but can’t see any effect of it in the site. Can you please help, we are using wordpress version 2.8.5.
hi. I just downloaded n activated this plugin. The problem is one paragraph or whatever paragraph that i set will only be one liner. I don’t like my preview to be too short. So I tried to deactivate this plugin. Surprisingly it didn’t go back to the original state.
Please advice.
any advice how to undo to my original state? why does deactivating ur plugin doesn’t remove the read mode. help
Hi,
I use the plugin and it’s great. I just have one small problem with it and I hope you can help.
The “Read more” has ‘#more-567′, with a different number for each post, appended to the URL so when the link is clicked the page opens up scrolled half way down!
Is there a way I can remove this from the link?
Best regards,
Ross
@pilotHans, Evermore never makes any permanent changes. When you deactivate it, everything goes back to the way it was before. It is likely that something else is causing your problem. I will have a look at your website and see if I can find out what’s happening.
@Ross, you can use my Seemore plugin to achieve the effect you want.
Thanks Bennett! Worked like a dream.