I'm using the Events Calendar by Modern Tribe in my website and I want to modify the widget. I have everything the way I want it except for one small detail... the excerpt. This is how the section of my code looks in my website, which pulls the events description. But I don't want the full description for the widget... I only one 10 words or so, followed by an ellipse (...). Any thoughts?
<div class="entry-content tribe-events-event-entry" itemprop="description">
<?php if (has_excerpt ()): ?>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
<?php else: ?>
<?php the_content(); ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div> <!-- End tribe-events-event-entry -->
You could use this to create custom excerpts
// get the post content
<?php $content = get_the_content(); ?>
<?php
// get the first 80 words from the content and added to the $abstract variable
preg_match('/^([^.!?\s]*[\.!?\s]+){0,80}/', strip_tags($content), $abstract);
// pregmatch will return an array and the first 80 chars will be in the first element
echo $abstract[0] . '...';
?>
I adapted this from this tutorial http://www.kavoir.com/2009/02/php-generating-summary-abstract-from-a-text-or-html-string-limiting-by-words-or-sentences.html hope it helps