Simplifying the Designation of Short-Form & Long-Form Content on My Site

I’ve been playing around and enjoying making design changes to the Twentig One theme again, after having some weird issue with it before, in that it wiped out all of my changes I had made to it when the theme was updated. Hopefully that won’t happen again, as I am making a lot of changes to it. But that said, I like how the developer has designed it, as it matches my own approach to design, especially with regards to how he structured and placed the design elements compared to other WordPress theme developers (who don’t seem to really understand how proper style inheritance is essential for the end user to be able to logically modify the theme).

This post isn’t so much about using the Twentig One theme though but more about a change I’ve made to it using the custom Excerpt block setting that the developer added to the theme. Basically he made a setting for the Excerpt block so that when it is enabled, it will only display an excerpt if you’ve manually added one. In other words, it won’t auto generate an excerpt which is how most WordPress themes work nowadays.

What this allows me to do is use the Excerpt block element as a conditional CSS design switch to simplify a lot of complexity I’ve been thinking about for years. And this complexity relates to trying to add some way to differentiate between long-form posts vs short-form posts but without having to manually use post formats, categories, or tags.

How I’ve achieved this is simple. What I’ve decided is that whenever a post has a manual excerpt added to it, it will treat the post as a long-form post and hide the content body from the blog list view. That’s it.

So it will still display the featured image, post title, excerpt, post date, and categories that relate to the post which is what you would normally see as an article preview on a person’s profile on Substack or Medium.

So the idea is that my blog list view will predominantly become filled by more short-form content, with the occasional long-form content preview needing to be clicked upon to read in full.