Using WordPress’ Excerpt (the_excerpt) Creatively

Using WordPress’ the_excerpt function, or that box that says ‘Excerpt’ creatively isn’t something that too many people do. Why not? Not sure. But maybe that will change – the_excerpt can do so much so easily.

Display a quote from an article

Something that I used to do on Nometet was have a blog-like layout with a quote from the article displayed below the title. It’s something that gives the reader a quick peek at what’s in store in the article and well, looks pretty cool! What’s more, it’s easy to do – just pop a quote into the excerpt box when you’re writing a post. To implement your exciting new quote, just pop <?php the_excerpt(); /> into your theme’s files.

Display a random quote in your header/sidebar/footer

Now that we’re displaying random posts on our homepage (as shown above), next thing we can do the_excerpt is show a random quote on our header/sidebar/footer. Assuming you’ve filled out the Excerpt field for all your posts, the following code will display a random quote, with a link to the article:

[php]&lt;?php query_posts(array(‘orderby’ =&gt; ‘rand’, ‘showposts’ =&gt; 1));

if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();