No automatically generated excerpt

[dd32]

Describe the bug
While testing #75 I discovered that since the content was moved from the editor, to the VCS-tracked pattern files, that WordPress no longer generates an excerpt for the pages.

This results in no description in the Opengraph tags, and no embed template text.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to https://wordpress.org/download/ with the new theme activated
2. (optionally) Apply Add structured content to download page #75
3. View source, observe empty description tags.

Expected behavior
The excerpt should be generated from the Pattern data, if not defined for the post.

Potential Solutions

1. Define the excerpt on the Download page.
2. ^ plus fallback should be generated from the Page Pattern content

Screenshots

[dd32]

For now, I've set the page excerpt to that of the existing downloads page Download WordPress today, and get started on creating your website with one of the most powerful, popular, and customizable platforms in the world. as the auto-generated-from-pattern-data excerpt wasn't amazing: Get WordPress Everything you need to set up your site just the way you want it. Download and install yourself For anyone comfortable getting their own hosting and domain. Recommend PHP or greater and MySQL or MariaDB version or greater. Set up with a hosting provider For anyone looking for the simplest way to start. […]

[tellyworth]

This sort of affects the front page too, except that it has some code to fall back to a default description.

Setting an excerpt on post pages seems like a fair solution for now.

Is there a saner way, going forward? If the content existed both in the post content and in the pattern files, would we get a usable auto-excerpt?

[dd32]

If the content existed both in the post content and in the pattern files, would we get a usable auto-excerpt?

It doesn't look like it, based on my comment above.

I suspect this is a case where we should really just be forced to define the except for all hard-coded pattern pages, but I'm not sure how to do that.

If we're not going to use post_content as the source-of-truth for the page content, we probably shouldn't rely upon post_excerpt for the description either.. although it's acceptable for-now (which is why I went with it)

[tellyworth]

Given #100, maybe the solution to this is to have a special block in the post/pattern that specifies the meta description. (And the excerpt, if we're using excerpts for anything other than meta desc)

[ryelle]

I've added what started as a proof of concept for the block idea over in WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins#253. It turned out better than I expected, though it doesn't do everything. I haven't put it in the milestone or asked for review since I don't know if that's the direction we want.

[ryelle]

This hasn't really come up, but I noticed the description for most pages is just the English content (excerpt). I'm going to mark this as an i18n issue too.

I just closed the block I made (from that comment 2yrs ago…), I think it would make more sense to either use the Jetpack SEO settings (and translate that), or figure out some way to get the processed pattern content and make an excerpt out of that.