Ask Jeff: How Did You Get The Photo To The Left Side Of Your Posts And How Was The Post Automatically Shorted?

This post is part of an ongoing series called Ask Jeff. This is where I’ll take a question someone within the WPTavern or WordPress community gives me and provide my thoughts/answer to. This question was submitted by Andrew.

How did you get the photo to the left side of your posts and how was the post automatically shorted?

I use a child theme called Hybrid News which is a theme built on top of the Hybrid framework. Out of the box, this theme has a frontpage template file that automatically cuts off posts after a certain character amount so that it only displays the excerpt. However, I don’t like the minimal amount of control I had over the display of the excerpt which is why I installed and use a plugin called The Excerpt Re-Reloaded. This plugin gives me the ability to fine tune the behaviour and display of the excerpt.

As for the images, this is another feature provided by the theme out of the box. Thanks to the Get_The_Image script Justin put into this theme, it can automatically take the first uploaded image in the post and use that as the post image thumbnail or you can specify which image to use based on the image URL. You can have the post thumbnails show up on the left, or right which is just a change in the CSS file.

In short, both features come with the theme out of the box except I used a plugin to modify the excerpt.

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