Show excerpt only on Planet feeds

[dmsnell]

Some very long feeds dominate the page at planet.wordpress.org, such as transcripts from interviews. Although sites in the feed can use excerpts and a more tag to limit the preview, the feed itself could summarize items in the blogroll by using an excerpt if one is available, and creating a default excerpt as a truncation of the item content if one isn’t provided.

This would be a good use-case for the HTML API as well, which can truncate HTML at certain content lengths while retaining the HTML formatting from the original.

[dd32]

At present planet is using the Python Planet script, which has limited customizability.

The ​16 year old codebase has numerous problems, including #7192 which caused me to alter the code to have a regex-replace to strip out some WordPress image HTML markup.

Any such customizability, such as a new UI, only showing excerpts, or other similar changes IMHO likely requires switching it away from the Python codebase and into something WordPress powered. Something that has not been a priority.

[dmsnell]

@dd32 sounds like this is perhaps a different issue altogether, though if we’re having trouble maintaining what we want, perhaps we could explore a PHP-native version using a spec-compliant HTML and XML parser. free to chat about this if you find yourself with too much free time and nothing to do. 🙃

[dd32]

Replying to dmsnell:

@dd32 sounds like this is perhaps a different issue altogether

Kind of :) My comment was more "Sorry, this isn't possible with the present setup, as the application we use for it has no customizability."

Matt has expressed he likes having it as full-text: ​https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/C18723MQ8/p1739733627783349?thread_ts=1739226841.748859&cid=C18723MQ8

@peterwilsoncc has investigated some WordPress-native solutions.