Two Blog Homepages

There’s a small problem with having what essentially amounts to two blog homepages…one for the tutorials section and another for the blog section. The problem is that I have to tell WordPress to use one as the actual blog homepage, which, in my case, I’ve already set up to be the tutorials page. By default, WordPress won’t let you use the “more” tag to clip posts on any pages other than the specified homepage. So, I did a little searching and found a really simple fix for this problem over at Weblog Tools Collection.

The Solution

The solution is incredibly simple, although, if you didn’t do the exact same Google search I did you may have trouble finding it, so here it is.

All you have to do is add the following line just before the code to display your post content:

<?php global $more; $more = FALSE; ?>

So you end up with something like this on the page where you want your posts to be cut off (the “Blog” page in my case):

<?php global $more; $more = FALSE; ?>
<?php the_content('Read more &rarr;'); ?>

Why It Works

I haven’t looked into the specific details on why this works, but it appears that WordPress uses the global variable “$more” as a flag to tell it whether or not the “more” tag should function on a given page. By default it’s probably set for whatever page you specify as your blog’s homepage, but not the rest. The code above sets the global variable “$more” equal to FALSE before displaying the post content so that WordPress respects the “more” tag on that page.

Ignoring the “More” Tag Once Again

Incidentally, you can set $more = TRUE immediately after displaying your content and WordPress will ignore the “more” tag in any posts following that one…like so:

<?php global $more; $more = FALSE; ?>
<?php the_content('Read more &rarr;'); ?>
<?php $more = TRUE; ?>

Hey, Copyblogger uses it, so it must work, right? Anyway, here’s a quick rundown of how to do it…

Open up index.php for your WordPress theme…as usual, use the default theme as a reference if you’re having trouble following along. Find the following line (it’s line #12 on the default theme):

<div class="entry">
<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?>
</div>

The only thing you need to change is what’s between the single quotes of the_content(‘…….’); – now change it so it looks like this:

<div class="entry">
<?php the_content('Click to continue &rarr;'); ?>
</div>

The “→” part is just the ascii code for a right arrow. Now your Read more link will look like this:

Click to continue →