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

1. Full download instructions are at the end of this article.
2. 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_excerpt template tag. You have to edit your theme to use it.
• Fancy excerpt is effectively an upgrade to the the_excerpt template 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.