WordPress Theme: Show Only Excerpt On Home Page

WordPress Theme: How to show only the excerpt on the home page instead of the entire post:

By default the twentyten theme shows the entire post on the front page. This can be controlled by using the “more” tag in the post so that only the text upto the “more” tag is shown and a “continue reading” link is shown thereafter.

The other option is to modify the core files to show only the excerpt:

(Don’t make changes to the default theme itself. Make a copy of it in the manner shown here)

(a) Open the loop.php file

(b) find the part that deals with the display of the post on the index page. It is at line 141 in my file and appears under the comment ” How to display all other posts”. Find this chunk of code:

>












→', 'twentyten' ) ); ?>
 '
' . __( 'Pages:', 'twentyten' ), 'after' => '
' ) ); ?>

Substitute by this code:

>













			

			

Now, only the excerpt for each post will shown on the home/ index page. You can customize the content of the excerpt by editing it in the post.