‘Limiting the Length of an Excerpt in WordPress’

In WordPress, there are two ways to display a summary of a post that I have found so far.  Depending on your scenario you can use either <?php the_content(‘Read more…’); ?>  or <?php the_excerpt(); ?>. I usually end up using both depending on the page that is being displayed and simply choose which with a “if, else” statement.  In most scenarios it is better to use the excerpt function but the default character length is either too short or too long.  The bad news for you is that there is no way to change this in WordPress without modifying some code.  The good news is that you can do this by simply modifying your theme’s functions.php file.