Excerpt Length

Having an issue with manually added Excerpts and the length of them. We recently added video highlights to our articles and place the embed code at the beginning of the post. We ran into the issue of the embed code showing up in the index page in the excerpt area.

To remedy this issue, we decided to just manually add excerpts using the Excerpt Box. Which works….however, we can’t seem to make it so that it looks just like the articles that don’t use the Excerpt Box. The length is to long. I was looking through the Excerpt Introduction documentation and seen that when using the Excerpt box to manually add excerpts all the excerpt rules in the Theme Panel are ignored.

Okay…we decided that we would just add a small piece of code to the bottom of the themes funtions.php file. I’ve used codes like this in the past on other WordPress sites and had no issues….however….I can’t get it to work on the Newspaper theme.

/**
 * Filter the except length to 20 words.
 *
 * @param int $length Excerpt length.
 * @return int (Maybe) modified excerpt length.
 */
function wpdocs_custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
    return 20;
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'wpdocs_custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

Anyone have any idea as to why it won’t work, or maybe have something different that will work? We just want to make manually added excerpts using the excerpts box mimic the look of posts not using the excerpts box in terms of length.