How to Control Excerpt Length and Behavior in Newsletter for WordPress

One common challenge when using the Newsletter plugin for WordPress is managing how post excerpts are generated and displayed within your email campaigns. Users often find that excerpts cut off at awkward points or don't behave as expected. This guide will help you understand how excerpt handling works in Newsletter and provide solutions to common issues.

Understanding the Excerpt Behavior

The Newsletter plugin primarily uses two methods to generate excerpts:

1. Explicit Excerpts: If a post has manually entered excerpt text in the WordPress excerpt field, the plugin will use this content.
2. Automatic Excerpts: If no manual excerpt exists, the plugin automatically generates one from the first part of your post content.

When using the Blog Posts block in the Newsletter composer, you can set a specific word count for excerpts under the 'Excerpt words' setting.

Common Issues and Solutions

1. Excerpts Not Respecting Read More Tags

Some users expect the plugin to use all text before the Read More tag () in their posts, similar to how some themes or other plugins like MailPoet handle excerpts. Currently, Newsletter for WordPress does not use the Read More tag as a cutoff point for automatic excerpts.

Workaround: To ensure consistent excerpt content, manually fill in the WordPress excerpt field for each post. This gives you complete control over what appears in your newsletter excerpts.

2. Excerpt Length Not Matching Settings

If your excerpt length doesn't match what you've set in the Newsletter plugin, the issue might be with your WordPress theme's configuration.

Solution: Check your WordPress excerpt length setting, which can be overridden by your theme. As seen in Thread 1, the Avada theme had set the excerpt length to 20 words globally. The user resolved this by:

1. Navigating to WordPress Settings > Reading (or checking theme-specific settings)
2. Increasing the global excerpt length to 50 words
3. Setting the 'Excerpt words' option in Newsletter to 50

This allowed the plugin to respect the longer excerpt length while maintaining theme compatibility elsewhere.

3. Formatting Codes Showing in Excerpts

When using page builders like Divi Builder, you might see formatting codes or shortcodes in your excerpts (as mentioned in Thread 10).

Solution: This occurs because shortcodes are typically only processed in frontend contexts. The Newsletter plugin team has acknowledged this issue. To resolve it:

1. Add manual excerpts to your posts to bypass the automatic extraction process
2. Alternatively, use a text-only version of your content for newsletters

4. Excerpts Appearing as Underlined Links

Some users reported excerpts suddenly appearing as underlined links (Thread 6). This was identified as a bug that has been fixed in a plugin update.

Solution: Ensure you're running the latest version of the Newsletter plugin. If the problem persists after updating, check your custom CSS or theme styles that might be affecting link styling.

Best Practices for Excerpt Management

• Use Manual Excerpts: For complete control over what appears in your newsletters, consistently use the WordPress excerpt field for each post.
• Test Length Settings: Experiment with different excerpt word counts in both WordPress settings and the Newsletter plugin to find what works best for your layout.
• Check Theme Compatibility: Be aware that your theme might override global excerpt settings, requiring adjustments in multiple locations.

While the Newsletter plugin doesn't currently support using Read More tags as excerpt boundaries, understanding how it handles excerpts can help you create more predictable and professional-looking email campaigns.