How to Add Excerpts for LearnDash Courses

Updated 3 years ago

by Dave Warfel

WordPress has a built-in feature called excerpts. Excerpts are designed for creating shorter descriptions of your content—think of them as a brief summary.

LearnDash disables excerpts for courses. For many people, this is fine and poses no issues. However, there are a few instances where you might want to include an excerpt with your courses.

If you're displaying courses on a default archive page
If you're using a page builder to display post information (i.e. Elementor's Posts widget). These can often only display WordPress excerpts, and will not be able to pull in the "Short Description" that LearnDash provides when using the Course Grid add-on.

The good news is that it's pretty easy to add excerpts back to LearnDash courses, so you can write your own custom excerpts. The following PHP code snippet will put an "Excerpt" area back onto the course editing screen in the right sidebar.

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All CSS code should either be placed in a child theme’s main CSS file (typically style.css), or the Additional CSS area of the WordPress Customizer.

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