Extending Wordpress’s RSS excerpts

Wordpress has a queer default RSS excerpt limit of 50 words while creating rss feed content. And regardless of the “use full text” setting in the syndication section of the reading options, the description field of RSS, which is used by some news readers, is limited to this length.

While syndicating content at http://blogs.lug-delhi.org - the ILUGD members blog aggregating site, I found out that all Wordpress sites were belching out tiny excerpts, while Drupal sites exported more content.

To tweak this setting, I used this SQL command to increase the length of description in RSS feeds of Wordpress installations, from the default of 50 words to 250 (my personal reasonable default).

update wp_options set option_value=250 where option_name='rss_excerpt_length';