How to Activate Excerpts for Pages in Wordpress Admin Panel

I always wondered why wordpress allowed excerpts for posts and not for pages. A bit odd considering that both posts and pages are stored in the same database table and can have the same values stored for them. I have found a rather nice work around for this in 2.3.3 and then came…….. Wordpress 2.5!

I recently had a chance to upgrade one of the sites that I manage to the brand new Wordpress 2.5. I noticed right away that drastic changes had been made to the admin section – some for the better and some for the worse.

One thing I noticed immediately was that the Post and Page screens had been completely overhauled. This made me wonder whether or not my custom mf_add_excerpt_to_page() function still worked.

No dice.

Broken.

Luckily it took under 10 minutes to upgrade the function to work with two-point-five. For your viewing pleasure (drum roll please? ) here are both versions:

Wordpress 2.3

<?php

add_action( 'dbx_page_advanced', 'mf_add_excerpt_to_page' );

function mf_add_excerpt_to_page(){
	global $post;
?>
	<div class="dbx-b-ox-wrapper">
	<fieldset id="postexcerpt" class="dbx-box">
	<div class="dbx-h-andle-wrapper">
	<h3 class="dbx-handle"><?php _e('Optional Excerpt') ?></h3>
	</div>
	<div class="dbx-c-ontent-wrapper">
	<div class="dbx-content"><textarea rows="20" cols="40" name="excerpt" tabindex="6" id="excerpt"><?php echo $post->post_excerpt ?></textarea></div>
	</div>
	</fieldset>
	</div>
<?php
}
?>

Wordpress 2.5

<?php

add_action('edit_page_form', 'mf_add_excerpt_to_page' );

function mf_add_excerpt_to_page(){
	global $post;
?>
	<div id="postexcerpt" class="postbox <?php echo postbox_classes('postexcerpt', 'post'); ?>">
	<h3><?php _e('Excerpt') ?></h3>
	<div class="inside"><textarea rows="1" cols="40" name="excerpt" tabindex="6" id="excerpt"><?php echo $post->post_excerpt ?></textarea>
	<p><?php _e('Excerpts are optional hand-crafted summaries of your content. You can <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_excerpt" target="_blank">use them in your template</a>'); ?></p>
	</div>
	</div>
<?php
}
?>

WordPress 2.9.1

These edits allow for drag and drop functionality in the WordPress Administration Panels.

add_action( 'admin_menu', 'mf_add_page_excerpt_box' );
function mf_add_page_excerpt_box() {
	add_meta_box( 'mf_page_excerpt', __( 'Excerpt' ), 'mf_page_excerpt_box', 'page', 'normal', 'high' );
}
function mf_page_excerpt_box() {
	global $post;
	$message = __( 'Excerpts are optional hand-crafted summaries of your content. You can <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_excerpt" target="_blank">use them in your template</a>' );
	print <<<EOF
	<div class="inside">
	<textarea rows="1" cols="40" name="excerpt" tabindex="3" id="excerpt">{$post->post_excerpt}</textarea>
	<p>{$message}</p>
	</div>
EOF;
}

You can enter each function/hook combination into your theme’s functions.php file.

One Step Beyond

Now that we have set up excerpts for out pages it might be a good time to make that box a little bit bigger… you know, the one where you type the excerpt into? You can add the following code to functions.php. Tested only in WordPress version 2.9.1

add_action( 'admin_head', 'mf_page_excerpt_css' );
function mf_page_excerpt_css() {
	print '<style type="text/css">#excerpt{ height:10em; }</style>';
}

Hope someone finds this useful.