Wordpress frontpage - full post or extract?

[swollenpickles]

On a wordpress blogs front page, what do you think is better, displaying the full post content for each post on the front page, or displaying a brief post extract (say the first 50 words of the post)?

[kimberlybarryd]

Depends on topic and your long wind. My self, I keep it brief and to the point, Im a doer(is that spelled right) not a sayer(again) Is your front page considered a static page with comments below? Good to have comments in view on your front page.

[Jelena]

I prefer full posts if they are not too long, but with the longer posts which requires at least one scroll, I am definitely going with only extract.

[goldfries]

in my case, i use excerpts for my tech blog.

the personal blog uses full post unless i find it too long.

[adalante]

I will use extract if the post is long otherwise is full

[BPartch]

I like excerpts, that way I can get a brief idea of where the article is going then decide if I want to read more. :)

[malique]

excerpts for me too! i hate a super long front page.

[davemcnally]

At the moment I'm using full posts. Mainly because I have yet to see the option for using only extracts.

[Clorox]

I prefer extracts. That way, when a user clicks to read the full post, they are also presented with the comments form at the bottom, and I can also get statistics on which articles are performing best.

[fatnewt]

My template shows the first post in full, followed by two other posts with extracts.

[SarahG]

Full posts unless the post is a tutorial and pretty lengthy, for my blog front pages. My site front page (combines 3 blogs) has the option of either (excerpts by default) simple so that spiders won't see too much dupe content.

[davemcnally]

So how exactly do you go about showing only an excerpt? I have read something about the "more" function or something but don't really understand it.

I would like to start having my entries show up as excerpts. Thanks :)

[Clorox]

If you use the wysiwyg editor, there is a "more" button somewhere (the actual look of the button will vary depending on the browser you are using)... you might have to hover over the icons to find it, but its there.

If you are in the code view, you can type in:
<!--more-->

This will cut off your frontpage post at that point, and place a "read the rest of this post" link to the whole article.

[SarahG]

It's on both the wysiwyg editor and non rich text editor :)

Alternatively you can edit your index page to only show the excerpt using the_excerpt() tag instead of the_content(). Depending on how your theme goes, you may need to use an if statement to work out which page the index.php file is being used on (if you have the single.php file then you don't need to worry about this issue).

[davemcnally]

Thanks for the help :)