Creating excerpt with simple "Read more" link

Question

I've read dozens of articles on how to create an excerpt but nothing has worked so far. For testing reasons I use the "Twenty Thirteen" theme, although I developed a child template.

In the index.php of Twenty Thirteen, I put the_excerpt() function in the loop. It looks something like this now:

if ( have_posts() ) :
    /* The loop */
    while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
        the_excerpt();
    endwhile;
    twentythirteen_paging_nav();
else :
    the_excerpt();
endif;

In the functions.php file I put the following code at the very top:

function new_excerpt_more($more) {        
    // Use .read-more to style the link
    return '...<span class="continue-reading"> <a href="' . get_permalink() . '">'.'Read More »' . '</a></span>';
}
add_filter('excerpt_more', 'new_excerpt_more');

but the complete excerpts are printed out all the time. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Though it's a bit of unnecessary things to answer your actual question, but for the fact, I used the following code into many of my News Portal WordPress sites, where I had the facilities to Control the excerpt length, and I changed the excerpt More link to my choice. All I did was using my new function echo nano_excerpt(50) instead of using the_excerpt().

<?php
/**
 * Change the excerpt length to some extent
 * where the default is 55.
 *
 * @param  integer $length
 * @return integer
 */
function custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
    return 200;
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

/**
 * Change the excerpt 'more'
 * @return string
 */
function new_excerpt_more() {
    return '... <a class="read-more" href="'. get_permalink( get_the_ID() ) .'">'. __( '&raquo;', 'your-theme' ) .'</a>';
}

/**
 * The excerpt filters
 * @param  integer $limit max limit of words to show
 * @return string
 */
function nano_excerpt( $limit = 75 ) {
    $limited_excerpts = wp_trim_words( get_the_excerpt(), $limit, new_excerpt_more() );
    return $limited_excerpts;
}

Just paste 'em into your functions.php and use the new function echo nano_excerpt($limit) - mentioning the limit of words you want, or leave it blank to show the default 75 words.

Source: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/the_excerpt