Twenty Twelve: Allow excerpts, if present, on index pages

[kwight]

It is possible for users to enter and save excerpts for posts, yet never see them because of the theme's sole use of the_content() for index pages (blog, archives). This is confusing at best, and frustrating at worst, for users wanting to take advantage of crafted excerpts to represent their posts.

By conditionally using the_excerpt() when an excerpt is present, users gain control, on a post-by-post basis, of their summaries. Simply using the <!--more--> tag is not sufficient as it only provides a cut-off point in the content, rather than allowing custom excerpts.

[lancewillett]

I vote to not change this behavior.

With Twenty Twelve we are continuing the same behavior used in two previous default themes, Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven, which is to only show excerpts on the search results view (and also on archives in the case of Ten).

[DrewAPicture]

-1 for this.

The manual excerpt is meant to override the generated one and should only be displayed when the_excerpt() is called in the template.

Edit: Didn't see the patch :/

[kwight]

I guess I just don't see it as expected, or even desired behaviour, particularly to any new user that hasn't been using the older default themes. It feels like we're hoping users will think it's the "short description for search results" section.

Hm, maybe what I really want is a filter for the Excerpt meta box description, so users know what they get when entering an excerpt. Of the five example uses in the Codex, Twenty Twelve only implements one (albeit the first one).

Thanks for considering.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Replying to kwight:

Hm, maybe what I really want is a filter for the Excerpt meta box description, so users know what they get when entering an excerpt.

'gettext' filter could be used for that:
​http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/gettext

[lancewillett]

Closing as wontfix after discussing with other developers in #wordpress-dev today (​log).