A friend of mine was looking for a bit help with his website. Quite simply, he wanted to show excerpts instead of the entire post for his blog.

Now, the way to do this in WordPress is to properly set up the theme when you build it. But that’s not really useful. He’s not going to switch the theme that he otherwise likes because of this one issue. And, to go into the theme files and change the wp-content to wp-excerpt is a bit of a stretch for non-developer.

So, I did some internet searching and found a function and filter, made a few tweaks and then bundled it up into a little plugin and now my friend can simply upload this plugin to his site and it’s done. If he decides later he doesn’t want it, he can just deactivate it.

Here’s the description:
Changes wp-content to show an excerpt on all archives (blog listings) and search listings. It also strips out any pictures or shortcodes in the listing view. This plugin allows you to change your website to show excerpts without having to change the functions.php file or any other php file in WordPress. There are no settings with this plugin. Simply activate to show excerpts or deactivate to show the entire post. This plugin is based on the contributions of http://justintadlock.com/archives/2008/08/24/replacing-wordpress-content-with-an-excerpt-without-editing-theme-files.

Here’s the file:
jnc-contenttoexcerpt.zip

Hope it works for you. Let me know if it doesn’t.