Changing the Length of Post That Shows on Front Page
By default Drupal will trim your posts to 600 characters. What this means is that if you have a story or posting that is longer than 600 words, Drupal will cut the content to the first 600 characters for the front page and then add a 'read more' link to the full posting.
There is a setting in Drupal that allows you change the ammount of characters that it will trim to. You can set it to the maximum of unlimited, meaning that your whole post will show on the front page and it won't cut any characters, to a minimum of 200 characters. If you set it to the mimimum, it would be like having the first few sentences of your post on the front page.
It's very easy to change the setting, but there is one issue to changing this setting if you have an active website... it won't change the amount of characters for a post that is already active. The new setting will only apply to new postings. All of your old postings will still show the amount of characters that was set when the post was last changed.
If you look at my last sentence their, you'll see a hint at how you can get your old postings to reflect the new character settings in Drupal. All you need to do is go to the posting you want to have the new settings applied, make an edit change, or you can just hit the submit button as Drupal will think you made an edit change. From here, the new length of characters setting will be applied for an older posting.
The unfortunate part is that if you have a lot of older postings, you have to do this to each one, as I do not know of a way to batch process this procedure. I fyou know of a way, please let everyone know in the comments.
Watch the video to see it in action... and Drupal rocks!
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Thank you, DrupalDude
The Dude Abides!
I appreciate the workaround. This is a bit kludgy, because if you need to edit a front-page story after doing this, you'd need to set the preview length to unlimited again, edit and save the page, then go back and set the preview length to 600. Wish Drupal were more flexible.
But your method works and gets the job done.
It is best to trim your posts to about 400
It is best to trim your posts to about 400 characters. That does not look too lengthy, but gives on the other hand enough data. It is also important to not the the 'read more' link is not really a back link, as it has obviously always the same anchor text. To balance that you can employ a backlink building service to build some links.
Short teasers is important on front page
Great article. 600 characters is too many as a teaser to an article for the front page. I found that for my Fantasy Hockey site it should only take 2 sentences to hook the reader and since we have shortened the amount of intro text, our average page views to those article have increased.
It has also cleared up some real estate for other things on the homepage.