However, if I understand your question correctly, you can try something like the following to give you a “Read More…” type link at the end of a manually created Excerpt. Just add this where appropriate in place of the the_excerpt() tags in your template files:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
	<?php if ( has_excerpt() ) { ?>
		<p><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="nofollow" title="Continue Reading <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>...">Read the rest of <?php the_title(); ?> &raquo;</a></p>
	<?php } ?>

Try that, and let me know if that was what you are looking for. Good luck!

I didn’t realises I already had the following in my functions.php at very top of the page. (provided by theme author)

remove_filter( ‘get_the_excerpt’, ‘wp_trim_excerpt’ );
add_filter( ‘get_the_excerpt’, ‘custom_excerpt’ );

Now I removed the “custom_excerpt” and using your…..works like a dream.

cheers

Just remember that the the_excerpt(); template tag needs to be used within The Loop. It also needs to be wrapped in php tags, like this:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

Hope that helps.

could you please tell me how I would call this function in my index.php?

I’ve tried the followings and didn’t work:
improved_trim_excerpt('');

the_excerpt();

....
$text = strip_tags( $text, '<a><b><em><i><strong>' ); // allowed tags (change as needed)
....

If you have already added that tag, and it’s still not working, let me know, and drop a link to the page with the excerpt in your response, so I can check out the outputted code, and then we’ll go from there. :)