Filling Excerpts automatically

Using Ghost
1

Hello,
I was wondering if there was an option so that Excerpts are filled automatically.
Right now, i have to fill manually all excerpts, I’d rather Ghost just take the 300 first character of my publication by default and use them rather than doing it myself.
It seems it’s supposed to work that way by default, so I might be missing something?

I’m using Ghost Pro, with Maali News theme.

Thanks in advance!

2

It sounds like your theme is checking for and using {{custom_excerpt}}, which will not generate an excerpt if one is not set, instead of {{excerpt}}, which uses the custom_excerpt if it exists, or generates an excerpt from the start of the post if it doesn’t.

3

One dream with AI integration for tuning this excerpts and make them dynamic like Discourse:

image
image632×768 93.9 KB

This function is not currently integrated to this forum but it’s working really good.

4

Yes, it seem they are :
post-card-simple.hbs:

    {{!-- {{#if custom_excerpt}}
      <p class="post-card-simple__excerpt">{{custom_excerpt}}</p>
    {{/if}} --}}

post-hero.hbs:

      {{!-- Custom excerpt --}}
      {{#if custom_excerpt}}
        <p class="post-hero__excerpt text-acc{{#is "page"}} mt-xs{{/is}}">{{custom_excerpt}}</p>
      {{/if}}

I suppose changing those to the following would work ?

{{!-- Custom excerpt or default excerpt --}}
{{#if custom_excerpt}}
  <p class="post-card-simple__excerpt">{{custom_excerpt}}</p>
{{else}}
  <p class="post-card-simple__excerpt">{{excerpt}}</p>
{{/if}}

{{!-- Custom excerpt or default excerpt --}}
{{#if custom_excerpt}}
  <p class="post-hero__excerpt text-acc{{#is "page"}} mt-xs{{/is}}">{{custom_excerpt}}</p>
{{else}}
  <p class="post-hero__excerpt text-acc{{#is "page"}} mt-xs{{/is}}">{{excerpt}}</p>
{{/if}}
1 Like
5

Yes, exactly. Or you should also be able to just use {{excerpt}} and remove all the logic, since it’ll take the custom_excerpt if it exists.

2 Likes
6

Awesome, even simpler !

I realise: Excerpts are behind paywall ? Is there a way to set this so they are public?

7

Ah. That’s a good reason for baking a little more logic into the theme. Custom excerpts are NOT paywalled.

8

Ah, but it removes the automated filling of Excerpt when non is provided :smiling_face_with_halo:

That would be a nice feature to have, to be able to set Excerpt visibility somewhere in the console (Labs?). Not sure it’s do-able in the API : is that something that can be added in the feature-request ? :slight_smile:

9

There’s an Ideas forum you could post in. I don’t think it’s currently supported in any way.