my excerpts lack the 'more' link

Question

on a site am writing, on the home page i want to achieve the following

• Posts should appear as excerpts with links to full article
• Editors should have the power to explicitly control excerpt length

I tried the following solution:

• create template file called home.php
• use the_excerpt() in the loop

The problem
'read more' link is missing if user specifies explicit 'more' <!--more--> when creating a post but strangely if explicit 'more' is not specified in post, the link to full article is available. What the hell is going on?

Answer 1

If you want to output the $post->post_content you need to use the_content() function, the_excerpt() function outputs $post->post_excerpt, so if the post doesn't have content on the excerpt field it doesn't output nothing.

A better solution should be a custom function that first checks for a user defined $post->post_excerpt and second for the $post->post_content and outputs the first defined.

Answer 2

The actual documentation for this is here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Customizing_the_Read_More

Read the following section: http://codex.wordpress.org/Customizing_the_Read_More#Read_More_Techniques