Introducing Content Options: An Easy New Way to Make Visual Changes to Your Site
Content Options takes care of small visual changes like showing or hiding the author, date, and more!
We’re excited to announce a newly launched Customizer panel called Content Options.
The Content Options section gives you an easy way to make small visual modifications across your site—like hiding the post date or displaying an excerpt instead of a full post, with no custom CSS needed!
There are three main features for now:
- Blog Display: choose between displaying the full content of each post or an excerpt on the blog and category, tag, and date archive pages. A “default” option is also available for themes that mix excerpts and full posts based on post format.
- Author Bio: Hide the author bio on single posts.
- Post Details: Show or hide the post date, tags, or categories.
You can see Content Options in action in this video:
Check out the full support documentation to learn more about how these new theme options work.
Not all the themes support all these features, but all new free themes will fully support Content Options.
Here’s an extended list of themes that either fully or partially support Content Options:
- Apostrophe
- Baskerville
- Big Brother
- Boardwalk
- Button
- Canard
- Cubic
- Dyad
- Ecto
- Edin
- Forefront (premium)
- Franklin
- Gateway
- Gazette
- Goran
- Harmonic
- Hemingway Rewritten
- Libre
- Libretto
- Motif
- Penscratch
- Pictorico
- Pique
- Rebalance
- Revelar
- Rowling
- Sapor
- Sela
- Sequential
- Shoreditch
- Twenty Sixteen
We also plan to add support for modifying other elements in the future, including the ability to hide featured images and author names. If you have more ideas, we’d love to hear from you!
- August 30, 2016
- Customization
WordPress.com News 
Hiding the feature image when desired… thank you!!!
LikeLiked by 4 people
It’s on our list 🙂
LikeLiked by 11 people
On the main page is there a way to keep the current post full view, but the previous posts as an excerpt? Maybe I am missing how to do this.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Do you mean on the blog page, the latest post is full post and all the older ones are excerpt? It’s not possible with Content Options but we have some themes that put a lot more emphasis on the first post than the rest, like Bushwick.
LikeLike
Oh OK. Thanks.
LikeLiked by 2 people
This is so cool! Can you also add an option to make the blog posts full-width for all the themes?
LikeLiked by 3 people
Do you mean without the sidebar?
LikeLiked by 4 people
Yes, without the sidebar. I’m using Canard and it doesn’t have such an option.
LikeLiked by 3 people
This can be achieve using Widget Visibility.
LikeLiked by 4 people
This works, but the only problem is that the content won’t go full width, it would just hide the widgets, but the div line would still be seen.
LikeLiked by 2 people
You will need Custom CSS to hide the line.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Hi
Thanks
There is no video in your mail : can you send me the link for this vidéo please Thanks and best regards
LikeLiked by 4 people
Please visit the post to view the video: https://wordpress.com/blog/2016/08/30/introducing-content-options-an-easy-new-way-to-make-visual-changes-to-your-site/
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thomas all except one of my posts are full view and people who read the short view didn’t even realise it was an excerpt. How can I attract them to click and read the full version because I’d like to make all except the latest post short view. I hope I’m making sense…
LikeLiked by 5 people
If we do nothing with this new feature, will the options we now have set remain as they were; or, will this new feature change some of the “defaults” away from what we may already have set up??
LikeLiked by 3 people
If you don’t touch the settings in the Content Options panel, everything will remain as it is now — nothing at all should change.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’d love to use these features, but there’s only one of these themes compatible with WordAds. Any chance the others will be added?
LikeLiked by 3 people
All WordPress.com themes are compatible with WordAds, but only a limited number of themes are optimized to show additional ad units.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Well shucks, the Zuki theme, which I use, doesn’t support this. Hope the author updates it soon!
LikeLiked by 2 people
How about an option to hide the title, like the WP Hide Title plugin?
LikeLiked by 4 people
In addition to hiding the author bio, where available, could it be possible to add an author bio, where none was formerly available? I’d love to add an author bio to Sela!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Just checked, twenty sixteen theme doesn’t support. Hope it will support soon.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Twenty Sixteen only supports Post Details.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m very pleased with these opportunities to make some themes more flexible. I’m using Sela and have so far opted for displaying my blog posts as excerpts. This is really helpful, especially for readers accessing my site on mobile devices. 🙂 Thanks.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Yes! I’ve wanted to hide tags for ages 🙂
LikeLiked by 4 people
Nice! Now I can hide additional details on my posts page because Goran theme supports the feature. Thanks!
LikeLiked by 4 people
Is Arcane theme on your list to get this feature?
LikeLiked by 3 people
It’s up to the seller I’d say. You can always ask on the support forum.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Is this a plugin that WordPress.com plans to make available for self-hosted sites in the future? Or is it something you add to the theme itself? Is the code available on GitHub?
LikeLiked by 2 people
It is a plugin and the goal is to ultimately include it to Jetpack but I can’t give you an ETA I’m afraid.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Content excerpts option is a life saver..thanks 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
This is great news! My current theme doesn’t support these, but with these extra options available on other themes I’m going to feel more free to try changing theme now – the option to show only excerpts is really important to me; and I remember deciding not to use a theme that I otherwise liked, because it had the author bio showing on each post and I really didn’t like that.
So hooray for more flexibility! Thank you!
LikeLiked by 4 people
I have been trying to find a theme that let’s me use excerpts, lets me set a featured image that is displayed with the excerpt, but does not stick the featured image to the top of the full post.
I have Custom CSS, and while I can sometimes change whether the featured image is displayed, I can’t, of course, force excerpts.
Now that the paid ‘Plans’ have changed, the ‘plan’ I have now will no longer support CSS customization unless I pay over twice as much – for a bunch of things I don’t want. I liked it better when these upgrade features were a la carte.
I will be a happy blogger if Nucleare or Lovecraft use excerpts, and I can hide the featured image from the header and/or the top of each post. I’d also like excerpt thumbnails that don’t chop off the tops and bottoms of the photo.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Got excited but realised it’s just the date in the post that can be hidden. When will we have the option not to display the date in the url ?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Unfortunately removing the date in the post URL is beyond what can be done with theme options. If that’s something that’s very important to you, the permalink structure can be modified on a self-hosted WordPress installation.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I would like to add a ‘Last updated’ date.
LikeLiked by 2 people
No Lovecraft theme…I guess I’ll have to wait and hope to will come available to my theme.
LikeLiked by 2 people
We’ve just added Content Options to Lovecraft 🙂
LikeLiked by 3 people
It would be nice if there is an option to display a blog post in full width, just like how the pages look when you click it.
LikeLiked by 5 people