Once you have published your post, the display of your post is controlled by your theme, not MyCurator. There are some options that do affect how your theme will display curated posts that originate with MyCurator.
The first thing to check is how posts are displayed on your site’s home or blog page. Most themes have an option for what they display. If you choose the full content, then the whole post will be displayed. You can change this by inserting More tags into your post. Most themes will only display the content of the post up to the More tag (called the teaser). They will then display a ‘Read More’ link to bring you to the full post (as will clicking on the title). As you curate posts, you’ll want to insert More tags for those with a lot of content.
Displaying an Excerpt
You can sometimes tell your theme to just display an excerpt on the home or blog page. If your theme can display an excerpt, it can be a bit complicated as to what will display!
- The theme will look for the contents of a field called ‘the excerpt’. This is not the full content of your post. MyCurator places the first 40 words of an article in this field. So by default, you will see the initial words of the article, not what you may have written about the article. You can turn off this saving of ‘the excerpt’ field by checking the Option “Do Not Save to Excerpt Field in Post” in the Admin tab. (It is not retro-active, so earlier posts will still have the excerpt saved, see step 3 below to change them). You can also change the number of words saved in the excerpt with the Option “Excerpt length in words:” in the Format tab.
- If you have turned off the above option, your theme will now display the first 55 words of whatever you have entered into the post. You might be able to change the number of words with your theme options.
- You can customize this excerpt on a post by post basis. In the post editor, choose the Screen Options in gray in the upper right of the page. You will see a list of checkboxes. check the one titled Excerpt. Now when you scroll down in the Post editor, you will see a metabox titled Excerpt. Whatever you enter here will be displayed on the front page of your site.
In a previous how-to post we talked about formatting the attribution link on your site.
Are there other options that would help you in displaying your curated posts? Please feel free to describe them in the comments.