what can be done to fix recent problems with display-posts excerpts

  • Unknown's avatar
    prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity · Member ·

    good afternoon! your service was working great until just recently. hopefully we can clear this up quick.

    on our homepage, we use this shortcode to filter posts to certain categories:
    [display-posts include_date="true" posts_per_page="15" include_excerpt="true" category="from-inside-prison,press-release,action-alert" wrapper="div"]

    unfortunately, as of a few days ago, instead of including the excerpt from each post, it shows a piece of text from the page that contains the shortcode: “Updates from the Coalition”. very strange… a bug?

    another problem that just popped up is that posts added to the categories we specified do not reliably show up in the listing generated by the shortcode. i’ve double… triple checked the spelling of the category slugs. it worked before, no change was made to the shortcode or category names, and now it isn’t working.

    For example: http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/shu-isolation-unit-installation-on-the-state-capitol-south-steps-august-14/ is categorized as an Action Alert, but doesn’t appear.

    Thanks in advance for your quick reply! this is really important for us!
    -ryan

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity · Member ·

    it appears that the solution to the second problem i mentioned above – that posts don’t appear in listings – is patience. perhaps this is a caching issue. about an hour after posting, the post listed above appeared.

  • kraftbj · Staff ·

    Good news is we can counteract this behavior now while we investigate what changed.

    Right now, it is pulling the excerpt of the page with the shortcode in it. SInce “Updates from the Coalition” is the only content before the shortcode, that’s the excerpt.

    The expectation, I’d agree, is it would pull from the post being queried.

    The excerpt is generated in one of two ways: By default, it pulls the first X characters of text to make the excerpt, or you can manually set it using the “Excerpt” field while editing the post that is included in the query (details: http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/excerpts/ , you may need to activate the feature in the Screen Options menu. Details at the link).

    I’ve tested it on your site and the manual excerpts DO carry over to the home page. I’d suggest, at least going forward, to set the excerpt manually and in the meantime, I’ll investigate the cause of the change further.

    You’re spot on regarding the delay. We cache just about everything for performance. If there’s ever an instance where you can’t wait, updating the page with the shortcode in it should be enough to trigger a refresh of the cache.

    Thanks for your patience and for using WordPress.com.

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