Thread

Hi, is there a way to show first n words of a blog entry in EE? Alternatively, the first paragraph?

I’m looking for a way to organize my /articles page. I need to display the list of latest articles where each list item is the first paragraph of the entry (not the article excerpt, but the first paragraph of the entry body), and have that paragraph link to the page for the full article.

Right now it just displays the last entry (which is set by the limit=“1” attribute, see below):

{exp:channel:entries channel="articles" limit="1" disable="pagination" status="Open | Featured Top Story"}
<section id="main-entry" class="blog-entry-body group">
<h2 class="blog-entry-title">{title}</h2>
{article_body}
</section>
{/exp:channel:entries}

Thanks, James

As far as I’m aware, I don’t think there is a way to do this with native functionality, but there are a whole raft of character/word limit plugins on devot-ee:

http://devot-ee.com/search/results/search&keywords=limit&channel=addons/

Personally I’ve used TruncHTML without problems on quite a few sites.

Thanks. Upon second thought, I think I’ll go with excerpts anyway - I don’t like sentences being chopped off after a set number of characters. It’s not very reader-friendly in my opinion.

Cheers, James

Thanks for the assist, metadaptive.

James, I agree - excerpts give you much better control. Going to go and close this thread since you have a solution. Don’t hesitate to post again as needed.