How To Create "READ MORE"

The Quick Answer

• Add tags to your posts to mark which parts you want hidden in the summary version.
• Add CSS declarations to your template to hide those sections on the index and archive pages, but not on post pages.

With this trick, you can choose to display an arbitrary amount of text from the beginning of each post, as a teaser for the whole thing. Then users who want to read the rest of the post can click a link to see the full text. This is handy if you have lots of long articles all on one page. Note that you'll need to have post pages enabled in order to make this feature work.

There are three ingredients that go into this feature: conditional CSS, a "read more" link for each post, and a modification for the posts that use this feature. So let's go through it step by step.

Conditional CSS

We're going to use conditional tags to change how posts display on different pages. Add the following code to your style sheet, depending on what kind of template you have:

(for classic templates)

<MainOrArchivePage>
span.fullpost {display:none;}
</MainOrArchivePage>

<ItemPage>
span.fullpost {display:inline;}
</ItemPage>

(for layouts)

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
span.fullpost {display:inline;}
<b:else/>
span.fullpost {display:none;}
</b:if>

"Read More"

Add the following code to your template, somewhere after the <$BlogItemBody$> or <data:post.body/> tag:

(for classic templates)

<MainOrArchivePage><br />
<a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>">Read more!</a>
</MainOrArchivePage>

(for layouts)

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'><br />
<a expr:href='data:post.url'>Read more!</a>
</b:if>

This link will only appear on the main page and archive pages, and it will redirect your reader to the post page containing the full text of your post. You can replace the "Read more!" text with whatever you like, of course.

Post Modifications

The final piece that we need is a little bit of code in your actual post. Each post that you want to use this feature on will need this code:

<span class="fullpost"></span>

This part can actually go in the post template, if you don't want to have to type it for each post. You'll enter the summary text outside the span tags and the remainder inside, like so:

Here is the beginning of my post. <span class="fullpost">And here is the rest of it.</span>

And then go to create new post and see the results