When I first installed my blog, I began with a basic permalink,
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/.
When I wrote my first post, I used the <!−−more−−> tag to create a short teaser on the home page. On clicking the “Read the rest of this entry »” link, the full post was displayed starting from the the break point on the home page instead at the beginning of the post. Furthermore, the permalink included “#more-3.” The permalink looked like this:
…/2008/10/06/wordpress-comes-to-select-digitals/#more-3
At wordpress.org, I discovered a neat plugin that fixed both problems. The plugin is More To The Top. After uploading and enabling this plugin, the permalink now looked like this:
http://www.blog.selectdigitals.com/2008/10/06/wordpress-comes-to-select-digitals/
Since my initial installation, I have changed my permalink to /%postname%/. Fortunately, I did not have many existing posts when I did this. Old URLs might still exist on the Web and search engines will continue to show these. When potential site visitors click on one of the old links, they get a “not found” error. Cleaning up URLs that no longer lead to existing web pages can be quite a job. So, my advice is to think carefully about the permalink structure you want to use and then stick with it. The problem is made more difficult by the conflicting advice from others on the Internet. A WordPress plugin that can help avoid “not found” errors is permalinks moved permanently.
If you want to use excerpts on your home page(found in the Post Advanced Options), you need to implement them. You need to make the following change to the index.php file in the /wp-content/themes/your-theme directory:
<div class=”entry”>
<?php the_content(‘Read the rest of this entry »’); ?>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
</div>
The code to change is at line 14 of the index.php file.
After implementing excerpts, simply type in the post description you want to appear on the home page in the excerpt text box.
I still use more tags in my posts in order to avoid full posts when I visit the archives or categories; so, I still find more-to-the-top useful.
