Playing with the theme functions file in Wordpress

December 7, 2008 | Posted by Sapphire

I’ve recently discovered the power of the Themes Function page in your Wordpress theme. It lets you achieve the same thing as if you’d hacked a core file (which would get overridden with every update – pain in the neck). For example, I had a site where I wanted to use The Excerpt Reloaded and Thumbnail for Excerpts on the front page. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t work together. All I really needed from The Excerpt Reloaded was a nice “Read more” link instead of that stupid ellipsis Wordpress insists on putting. A little more research showed me that all I needed to do was insert some code into my Theme Functions file.

Since I’m not a php coder, I have to rely on others to write functions for me. If you can write your own functions, you’ll be ahead of the game. I got this code from DNExpert:

remove_filter(‘get_the_excerpt’, ‘wp_trim_excerpt’);
add_filter(‘get_the_excerpt’, ‘my_wp_trim_excerpt’);
function my_wp_trim_excerpt($text) { // Fakes an excerpt if needed

if ( ” == $text ) {
$text = get_the_content(”);
$text = apply_filters(‘the_content’, $text);
$text = str_replace(‘]]>’, ‘]]>’, $text);
$text = strip_tags($text, ‘<p>’);
$excerpt_length = 50;
$words = explode(‘ ‘, $text, $excerpt_length + 1);
if (count($words) > $excerpt_length) {
array_pop($words);
array_push($words, ‘ … <a href=”‘. get_permalink() . ‘”>READ MORE</a>’);
$text = implode(‘ ‘, $words);
}
}
return $text;
}

There are two settings you can customize in there: $excerpt_length, and the exact words you want for your permalink (see array_push, and alter the phrase “READ MORE”).

I also found another neat trick somewhere in the Wordpress help files. I like to have as few lines of code between the top of my page and my first post as possible, and more recent versions of Wordpress inserts a couple of unecessary ones:

<link rel=”EditURI” type=”application/rsd+xml” title=”RSD” href=”http://ChillyCool.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd” />
<link rel=”wlwmanifest” type=”application/wlwmanifest+xml” href=”http://ChillyCool.com/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml” />

And there’s no obvious way to get rid of them, except by putting the following code into your Themes Function file:

remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘rsd_link’);
remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wlwmanifest_link’);

So how do you insert this code, exactly? Your existing Themes Function file will look something like this (it can vary, depending what your theme designer has done with it):

<?php
if ( function_exists(‘register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebar();
?>

Some of mine have some more lines after register_sidebar();, and this is exactly where you should add your code. It doesn’t matter what order the various functions are in, so just make a new line afterregister_sidebar(); and paste in the additional code. My Themes Function file on this site looks like this. The stuff that was already in there is in regular font; the stuff I added is bolded.

<?php
if ( function_exists(‘register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebars(2,array(
‘before_widget’ => ‘<div id=”%1$s” class=”widget %2$s”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</div>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h2>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h2>’,
));
remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘rsd_link’);
remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wlwmanifest_link’);
remove_filter(‘get_the_excerpt’, ‘wp_trim_excerpt’);
add_filter(‘get_the_excerpt’, ‘my_wp_trim_excerpt’);
function my_wp_trim_excerpt($text) { // Fakes an excerpt if needed

if ( ” == $text ) {
$text = get_the_content(”);
$text = apply_filters(‘the_content’, $text);
$text = str_replace(‘]]>’, ‘]]>’, $text);
$text = strip_tags($text, ‘<p>’);
$excerpt_length = 75;
$words = explode(‘ ‘, $text, $excerpt_length + 1);
if (count($words) > $excerpt_length) {
array_pop($words);
array_push($words, ‘ … <a href=”‘. get_permalink() . ‘”>READ MORE</a>’);
$text = implode(‘ ‘, $words);
}
}
return $text;
}
?>