The theme I am using has a page called 'home' whos body is displayed on the home page. I have another page set up called 'about' which is a detailed about page and quite long. I want there to be text on the homepage that is a short synopsis of the about page. I have this synopsis in the excerpt of the 'about' page. Is there a way for me to use that excerpt in the body of the 'home' page?
By doing it this way I can tell the client that all the about information is in one page instead of telling him to go to different pages to edit things that are directly related.
edit: I want to do it without editing the themes code so through the admins page editor
Rather than using "include", you could use the following to get the page excerpt of the about page and stick with native wordpress functionality:
$about = get_page_by_title( 'ABOUT_TITLE' );
$about_excerpt = $about->post_excerpt;
Then you can echo it into your theme template using:
<?php echo $about_excerpt; ?>
If you wanted to do this within the Wordpress backend, you would create a custom shortcode and wrap the above into a function to be called by that shortcode. Then you could put that shortcode wherever you wanted on any post/page.
EDIT:
Here is an example of doing this via shortcode so that you can use this for the About page or any other page with an excerpt within Wordpress:
add_shortcode( "Excerpt", 'nb_excerpt_shortcode' );
function nb_excerpt_shortcode( $atts, $content = null ) {
extract( shortcode_atts( array(
'for' => ''
), $atts) );
$page = get_page_by_title( $for );
$excerpt = $page->post_excerpt;
return $excerpt;
}
Then call it into action with [Excerpt for="About" /]
It sounds like something as simple as a PHP include of your 'about' file in your home file would give you what you are looking for ...
Place this code ( or an excerpt thereof ) in your home file, and make sure that your 'about.php' file is in the same folder...
<body>
<div id="about">
<?php include("about.php"); ?>
</div>
</body>
This would allow you to make changes to your about file without directly affecting your home, but the changes would be applied to both pages...