We can see from the images in the last post that we have a text link Continue Reading… in this section we are going to turn this into a button that fits in nice with out theme, to do this we will edit the excerpts function in the functions.php file.

As we see in the earlier posts some Artisteer functions have parameter arrays that we can pass in, we do not need to cut out code to change the ‘Continue Reading’ to a single word like ‘More’ we can just pass a parameter to the Artisteer function, this means that on our home page we can have the word ‘More’ but our post lists will still display the text link.

Content-Home.php

Lets for our theme open our new content-home.php file this is the one where we passed in the thumbnail parameters as $arg  we will change that name to something more meaningful in this section $thumb.

Download Part Two Files: Investica Part Three (473)

We are passing two arguments to the theme_get_excerpt() function, these will override the defaults and display our changes, the first in our $excepts array is the ‘more_tag’ notice the __( this is for localisation in a WordPress language file.

The second is our a new parameter we have added called ‘more_button’, this is because we need a flag to tell the function if we want text or a button returned to our post, we have used a 1 here we could use true.

We edit the line at row four ($thumb) and add the lines five and six, then in the array elements ‘thumbnail’ and ‘content’ we pass in the two array variables $thumb and $excerpt, this is all we do in the content-home.php file.

<div class="two-column">
<?php
/* set the thumbnail size */
$thumb= array('size' => array(250,170) );
/* custom More Button */
$excerpt = array('more_tag' => __('More', THEME_NS),'more_button' => 1);
?>
<?php
    global $post;
    theme_post_wrapper(
        array(
                'id' => theme_get_post_id(),
                'class' => theme_get_post_class(),
                'thumbnail' => theme_get_post_thumbnail($thumb), //Large Thumbnail
                'title' => '<a href="' . get_permalink( $post->ID ) . '" rel="bookmark" title="' . get_the_title() . '">' . get_the_title() . '</a>',
                'before' => theme_get_metadata_icons( '', 'header' ),
                'content' => theme_get_excerpt( $excerpt ),
                'after' => theme_get_metadata_icons( '', 'footer' )
        )
    );
?>
</div>

functions.php

If we view our theme now we will see the changed more tag but not the button, we have to add code for the button style in the functions.php we open this file and navigate to line 250, and we insert a new variable to take the value we passed in with the ‘more_button’ this will be used as a condition a little way down the function, at line 249 find the code : null)); add these two lines with returns and line feeds before and after.

/* We want to show a button on two column posts */
$more_button = theme_get_array_value($args, 'more_button', 0 );

We then look at line 315 to 317 which should look like this:

if ($show_more_tag) {
    $the_contents = $the_contents.' <a class="more-link" href="'.$perma_link.'">'.$more_tag.'</a>';
}

We want to add a condition here to see if the $more_button is set if it is we output a button style string, if not the standard string is returned.

if ($show_more_tag) {
    // Added Button Condition
    if ($more_button) {
        $the_contents = $the_contents.'<br></br><span class="art-button-wrapper" style="margin-top: 5px"><span class="art-button-l"></span>';
        $the_contents = $the_contents.'<span class="art-button-r"></span><a href="'.$perma_link.'" class="art-button">'.$more_tag.'</a></span>';
    }else{
        $the_contents = $the_contents.' <a class="more-link" href="'.$perma_link.'">'.$more_tag.'</a>';
    } // Added Close Condition
}

If we look at this we have added the art-button-wrapper, art-button-l, art-button-r and the art-button spans and classes, notice that we have added a <br></br> tags so our button is on a new line, we have also added an inline style with a top margin of 5 pixels.

Open the functions.php in the download to see where this code fits in the theme_get_except() function, look at the other parameters that we can pass in that may help with other themes.

As we can see the button looks quite nice for the home page, we can have to look at the number of words for the excerpts in Admin > Theme options and change this setting to reduce the number of words for a more uniform display.

In the next part we will be looking at moving the title, as the layout is code driven we will copy one of the Artisteer functions, re-name and use this for the updated layout.