php the_content()

Found this great plug in-
Content Extract that I was able to modify and use. I simply forced it to always grab content and never mind the extract if there is one and then remove the leading and trailing html tags and insert my own.

This is an annoying “feature” of WordPress. What’s the point of templating if the template tag will itself force <p> and </p> tags around the values returned?

Wp team, please consider:

1. Returning values for the_excerpt and the_content without any surrounding tags, whatsoever. There should be an option to strip HTML tags for both.

2. Allowing the_excerpt and the_content to be returned into values (instead of just displaying them with functions) so we can use them in PHP variables to do out stuff.

Thanks.

For the record: I am not part of what would be considered the “WP team”, a.k.a. developers.

However my gut reaction to your “big” idea is this:
99.99% of the WP users just want to blog. They don’t want and they don’t know any PHP code and trickery. And the software provided by the WP team is excellent for what it was meant: blogging.

So, stop posing your personal, unique expectations as mass demand. They are not. And if you know code that well… write your own.

Yeah but Moshu, if the ability that he is talking about WAS added, is it going to prevent people from blogging? No. Will it make it more user friendly for those that want to customize? Sure. Win win situation.