Thematic Child Theme – Show excerpts on home page instead of full posts.

hey danielle,

i’ll be happy to help… but please post your questions in the thematic forums. i don’t really keep up w/ the WP forums for thematic.

https://www.thematictheme.com/forums

though the answer is already available on the old forums:
https://themeshaper.com/forums/topic/excerpts-on-home-page#post-10621

please don’t post there either. we’re trying to get everyone to thematictheme.com for easier support

Problem solved. Turns out my entire functions.php file was messed up.

In case anyone else stumbles upon this thread with a similar problem, here is my solution:

I was originally using the functions.php from the thematicsamplechildtheme folder, which I could not get any functions to work with. Solution, I just made a new blank functions file and started fresh, pasting my functions codes into the blank file. Of course don’t forget to use the opening and closing php tags at the beginning and end of the file.
Example:

<?php
PASTE YOUR FUNCTIONS HERE
?>

So to change my home page to show the excerpts instead of full posts, I add the following code, and my new functions.php now looks like this:

<?php
function childtheme_content($content) {
	if ( is_home () ) {
		$content= 'excerpt';}
	return $content;
}
add_filter('thematic_content', 'childtheme_content');
?>

Hope this helps anyone else who may have this problem in the future.

Thanks Helga and Danielle. The above function was exactly what I needed.

If anyone is looking to go one step further by adding a “read more” link at the end of the excerpt, use the following function:

function all_excerpts_get_more_link($post_excerpt) {

	return $post_excerpt . '<a href="'. get_permalink($post->ID) . '">' . 'Read More...' . '</a>';
}
add_filter('wp_trim_excerpt', 'all_excerpts_get_more_link');

Source: https://themeshaper.com/forums/topic/read-more-link-in-manual-excerpt#post-12992

Links to further resources explaining this at source link.