So I decided to build my own WordPress theme from scratch.  I know, it seems like that is all I’m posting about, but that is what I am wanting to learn right now…and I try to post what I am learning.  Here is one of the most recent things I have done.

Most WordPress sites out there have 10 posts on the home page, and it is the whole post.  It can make for a very long page.  I prefer to have a lot of the most recent page on the home page, and then excerpts of the other recent ones.  The function “the_excerpt()” does not let you specify the amount of characters, so I either had the whole post, or just a little.

On this site I limit the amount of characters to 6,000 by using a function (not in WP by default, if you need it, let me know via email) called “the_content_limit()”.  I thought that was a great thing, but it stripped all of the html.  I wanted to keep my breaks, so I wrote this:

	$content = strip_tags($content, '<p><br><br />');
	$content6 = substr($content, -6); // grab last 6 chars
	$last6array = str_split($content6); // split the 6 in an array
	if (in_array("<", $last6array)) {
		$content = substr($content, 0, -6);
	}

The code just checks to see if the last 6 characters have a < and if so, strip it.  We want to make sure that all tags are closed.