In the Search results, I see that {excerpt} pulls up a 50 word excerpt for that particular entry.

Is there some way to use this code in other areas?  I would be interested in having my comments page possibly generate an automatic excerpt at the top of the page, above the comments.

I thought that I could do this with the {summary} tag, which leads to my second question.

Is it possible to have a summary automatically generated for each entry?  I know I could use this tag in the Comments Index, but don’t necessarily wish to go back and manually create summary entries for each and every post. (I am transferring an older blog over to EE.)

Thanks for your help.

you could use {body} with the word limiter or character limiter plugins to do this, no?

I think that would be the easiest way at the moment….

The {excerpt} variable is special for the search results tag.  Because each weblog can have a different set of entry fields and because you can show results from multiple weblogs together, in each weblog setup you specify a field that will provide the excerpt content.  The {excerpt} variable displays that content.

> Is it possible to have a summary automatically generated for each entry?

LisaJill hit on what I would suggest: using either the Word Limit or Character Limit Plugin on the {body} field.  The “Filter HTML” Plugin would also work.  See EE Plugins site for info.

I used the Word Limit and it’s working great.  A very simple and effective solution.  Thank you both for the replies.