Customizing the blog post web part to not show entire entries

Question

I have a blog site, and as you know, the posts web part shows the entire contents of each listed post, rather than one paragraph, followed by a "click here to read more" link.  I know that there is no out-of-box functionality for this, because of course,
why would there be? Who needs nice looking blogs?  Anyway, I found this on the internet:
http://zabistop.blogspot.com/2009/02/customizing-sharepoint-blog-posts-web.html
It knows what's up, but it's outdated and the code doesn't mesh with what I have. Are there any articles similar to this online? I can't be the first person who thought of this, and doing it from the ground up is not an option. I appreciate any help.

Answer 1

In 2010 you can make the same changes using a similar method.
Open the default.aspx page, in code view click in within the blog area. In the ribbon click on the List View tools >design. Click on Customize XSLT in the Actions panel. When you do that you will be able to see all the code.
Find this line of code <xsl:template name="FieldRef_Note_body.Body" ddwrt:dvt_mode="body" match="FieldRef[@Name='Body']" mode="Note_body" ddwrt:ghost="hide">
Approx line 402. It actually looks like   </xsl:template><xsl:template name="FieldRef.... so you will have to place your cursor after the template close and hit enter a few times to make space for the code.
Directly above that line, where you have added spaces, include this code. (I cheated and grabbed this code from another site where we did the same thing - and was able to modify it slightly to work for the blog.)
<!-- used to strip out HTML from passed-in field -->
    <xsl:template name="removeHtmlTagsFromField">
     <xsl:param name="html"/>
     <xsl:choose>
         <xsl:when test="contains($html, '&lt;')">
             <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($html, '&lt;')"/>
             <!-- Recurse through HTML removing all markup -->
             <xsl:call-template name="removeHtmlTagsFromField">
                 <xsl:with-param name="html" select="substring-after($html, '&gt;')"/>
             </xsl:call-template>
         </xsl:when>
         <xsl:otherwise>
             <xsl:value-of select="$html"/>
         </xsl:otherwise>
     </xsl:choose>
 </xsl:template> 
Next below the line ( should be the next line below the pasted code)   <xsl:template name="FieldRef_Note_body.Body" ddwrt:dvt_mode="body" match="FieldRef[@Name='Body']" mode="Note_body" ddwrt:ghost="hide">
Locate the       <xsl:param name="thisNode" select="."/> and paste the following code:
  <!-- call "removeHtmlTagsFromField" template to strip out html markup from the field -->   
 <xsl:variable name="textOnlyDescription">
     <xsl:call-template name="removeHtmlTagsFromField">
         <xsl:with-param name="html" select="$thisNode/@*[name()=current()/@Name]" />
     </xsl:call-template>
 </xsl:variable>
I have already swichted out the select content with the content that was in the xsl line that renders the body content.
Locate the code  ( should be 2 lines down)     <xsl:value-of select="$thisNode/@*[name()=current()/@Name]" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
Comment the code out and replace with the following code:
      <xsl:value-of select="substring($textOnlyDescription, 0, 320)" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
      <xsl:if test="string-length($textOnlyDescription)>320">...</xsl:if>
Change the number to your desired length.
Save your file.
You can revert the file if you ever need to, after its checked in, by right clicking on the page and selecting reset to site definition. 
Hope this helps. I plan on doing a post shortly covering this and will have screen shots.
Heather Waterman SharePoint Desginer www.heatherwaterman.com