I just needed to set this up for myself so why not write a brief tutorial so I will remember. I originally found this at here
I am repeating this information since I often have to do the same thing on other blogs for clients and such and to further explain some points I messed up on via the original.
In essence to repeat what was said the code below will go into the functions.php of your individual theme. Utilizing CODA i log in to my server and open this folders path: blog > wp-content > themes > your theme name >functions.php . Within functions.php , I just created a space among the other functions and pasted the code below and saved the file – do not close the file as you may need to return to the original state (note that there is a comment added that is different form the original):
function string_limit_words($string, $word_limit)
{
$words = explode(' ', $string, ($word_limit + 1));
if(count($words) > $word_limit)
array_pop($words);
return implode(' ', $words);
}
Now In the same folder within your them locate index.php and replace the line :
with :
I originally tried to just replace the the words : the_content with all of the other code. Now after a couple of tries I slapped my head got it. Not too tough really, and it works very well.