[Closed] How to call and use the custom excerpt from a post

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[brianF-3]

Tell us what you are trying to do?
We use the custom excerpt on posts so that we can precisely control what information is provided when using the excerpt. See graphics attached for example. I need to figure out how to properly call and use the custom excerpt. When I add the excerpt field in a view, it uses the main post body and supplies an excerpt with the default character restrictions whether there is text in the custom excerpt box or not.

I have tried many different settings from searches on the forums, and other google searches.

here is the snipped that is being used in my view.
<p>[wpv-post-excerpt length="75" count="word" more=" ...READ MORE"]</p>

I have assigned a word count for the time being but using the first 75 words of our post body is not the intention. We mostly write a different summary and add it to the excerpt box when adding new posts.

We are using Divi pagebuilder, but this particular post type is "native" and not a divi page.

I would love to have the shortcode or proper function so that we use the excerpts when entered versus the full page body as seems to be the case when using the current shortcode posted above. I realize that some examples the body and excerpt will seem the same, but we write those excerpts to be stand alone pieces. We have a membership site and we allow public access to excerpt text while members behind the paywall get the full body text.

[Nigel]

Hi Brian

I jut double-checked that the wpv-post-excerpt shortcode works correctly with manual excerpts on my own site, and it does, so I'm not sure what is going wrong in your case.

I would say that if you have manual excerpts for your posts then you shouldn't include the link in the more attribute of the shortcode; that would only be displayed if your excerpt was trimmed to the specified length, regardless of whether the source of the text being trimmed was the full post body or your manual excerpt. (Manual excerpts get trimmed, to. If you don't want them to be you should set some overly long length setting.)

If your manual excerpt is not being displayed at all (maybe you could test a post by making the manual excerpt something banal like "this is a manual excerpt" as I did on my test site) to be clear what the source is.

And if the manual excerpt is not being used then the next step would be to confirm if the problem occurs in a minimal setup (non-Toolset plugins disabled, a standard theme like twentytwentyone).