Any Ideas for Including "More Tag" with get_pages($args)?

Question

I have run into an interesting issue.

My intention is to have a front-page.php that displays a list of pages, with titles and content (some of which may be truncated with tag.

I have augmented the below filtered arguments to do this, but have been unable to prevent it from displaying the full content each time:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_pages#Displaying_Child_pages_of_the_current_page_in_post_format

Here's the code:

            <?php 
                $args = array(
                'sort_order' => 'asc',
                'sort_column' => 'post_title',
                'hierarchical' => 1,
                'post_type' => 'page',
                'post_status' => 'publish'
); 
$pages = get_pages($args);
foreach( $pages as $page ) {    

    $content = $page->post_content;
    if ( ! $content ) // Check for empty page
        continue;

$content = apply_filters( 'the_content', $content );
?>  
    <h2><a href="<?php echo get_page_link( $page->ID ); ?>"><?php echo $page->post_title; ?></a></h2>
    <section class="<?php echo $page->post_name; ?>">

    <div class="entry"><?php echo $content; ?></div>
    </section>
<?php
}   
?> 

Now, I'm aware that:

<?php global $more; $more = 0;  ?>

is the purported solution to this, but it does not appear to work, regardless of placement within the code.

Has anyone experienced similar and solved this? I further realise that using a WP Query with post type 'page' is a potential workaround, but have found that solution is not without it's own issues, like the ability to filter out sub pages.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated. I was unable to find a solution to this with a decent amount of interweb hunting.

Answer 1

Here's the code I am using (successfully):

   $pages = get_pages($args);
    foreach( $pages as $page ) {    

    $content = $page->post_content;
    // Get content parts
    $content_parts = get_extended( $content );
    if ( ! $content ) // Check for empty page
        continue;

$content = apply_filters( 'the_content', $content );
?>  
    <h2><a href="<?php echo get_page_link( $page->ID ); ?>"><?php echo $page->post_title; ?></a></h2>
    <section class="<?php echo $page->post_name; ?>">

    <div class="entry"><?php echo $content_parts['main']; ?></div>
    </section>
<?php
}