WordPress Excerpts Are Not Teasers

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

This article was inspired by Issue #9620, which is a feature request for WordPress 2.9:

Article Leads/Post teasers

Create hooks to make it easier for themes to give users a quick way to make an article lead on their home page (headline, optional byline/date, thumbnail image, first few sentences). Would be ideal it was set up so that themes/users could create multiple lead types, like one with a larger image and excerpt for a main promo, and smaller images/excerpts for the longer lists of content below. Common to magazine-type sites, news sites, and useful for many other types of blog that want to tease content on the home page rather than using the default post stream.

(Before you read any further, I want to make something perfectly clear: what follows in is no way criticism of WordPress or WordPress developers. But there is a difference between teasers and excerpts which is worth further investigation, and that’s what we’re doing here.)

One of the suggestions is to beef up the excerpt capabilities that already exist.

Should it be done using excerpts?

What is an excerpt, anyway? Good question, let’s look it up:

An excerpt is a long quotation extracted from a much longer body of work, such as a book, or music score.

An excerpt could be used as a teaser… but extracting just the right section of an article that functions as a teaser or a lede could be difficult.

Here’s why:

Excerpts are used as extended quotes, typically to support enclosing text. An author proposes a thesis (say, “cats are evil”), and uses an excerpt to support his or her thesis, like this:

“…then, Fluffy threw up all over the reupholstered sofa, and we were never able to get the smell of sardines out. Later, the scratching cost us a fortune when…”.

(Disclaimer: Dr WordPress loves cats. Really.)

Teaser and ledes are used to entice readers, who may be scanning, to slow down and investigate. Turn the page, or click the link to read more. Teasers and ledes can be written completely independently, and contain no extract from the article or book. A teaser or a lede is essentially a very short piece of sales copy. For example:

Anne Author, using hundreds of confidential insurance claims as supporting evidence, demonstrates decisively that the common house cat, is, in fact, evil. Read this shocking expose now!

Big difference.

Just to be sure, let’s check the definitions of “teaser” at The Free Dictionary and Merriam-Webster. And lead as well: The Free Dictionary and lead.

There we have it: teasers are used as advertizing, leads are used to start articles. Teasers, leads and other marketing devices help readers understand benefits they get from reading. It’s certainly possible to use an excerpt as a teaser or a lede… but possible is not the same as recommended.

So, what to do?

The suggestions provided by the programming team don’t really address the request for the feature. Simply using a function called “the_excerpt” violates literate programming techniques when used for handling teasers or leads. It’s not the literate programming per se… but it’s much cleaner to handle these in functions called “the_teaser()” or “the_lede().”

I know programmers pretty well, because I program myself. I would expect any of the programmers commenting on that feature request would more-or-less respond to any further agitation something like this: “Ok, fine. Send a patch if you want it so bad and we’ll take a look at it.”

(If you don’t know what a patch is, well, that’s not their problem, nor should it be. The onus is on us to get with the program!)

The request really does nail it: having user creation of lede/teaser would happen on the New Post screen is definitely the correct way to implement this capability. Which leads to the next question…

…if teasers and ledes are so useful, who’s going to write the code?

Here’s my 3 part proposal:

1. Implement teasers and ledes using the Custom Fields capability. This is what Custom Fields is for anyway.
2. If teaser and lede capability proves useful, then move it from Custom Fields to a plugin.
3. If the plugin proves popular and useful (that is, if it helps drive SEO), then and only then move these functions into core.

I’m really interested in doing this myself, for several reasons. However, it’s pretty far down my current task list. If you have a pressing desire to make this happen… press the contact button above and we’ll discuss terms. I’m available starting July 1 2009.

[Update November 5, 2009]

Demetris at op111 wrote a fantastic article on WordPress excerpts, and here’s his excerpt for that article (and it is an excerpt):

WordPress excerpts, which are not excerpts in the common sense of the word, make a WordPress site easier to browse and its content easier to discover. When also used as META descriptions, good excerpts bring more and better traffic from search engines.

This article looks into the WordPress Excerpt and explains how to use it.

Tagged as: Advertising, Lead, Teaser