33 | Automatically Shorten the Manual Excerpt
When you are building or modifying a wordpress theme, you have the choice of either using ‘the_content()’ to show the full article, or ‘the_excerpt()’ to show a shorter version.
By default, the latter limits the output to the first 55 words of the post, and automatcally strips formatting and images.
To make things more flexible, the editor also allows you to add a manual excerpt that will have preference before the automatically generated one.
There is no default … » read more »

