In WordPress, the post excerpt can be displayed using a function called the_excerpt(). This function has no parameters but it does have some filters which you can hook into. I discussed changing the length and the trailing elipses using filters in my article Quick & Easy Excerpt Mods Coming in WordPress 2.9.

Recently, a design I was working on required the excerpts to be styled a certain way. By default, WordPress displays excerpts wrapped in a basic paragraph tag. Without a class or an ID, I had no way of differentiating the excerpt from any other element. To accomplish this I needed to write a function that would hook into the filter the_excerpt and include a class in the paragraph tag.

All it took was a few lines of PHP added to the theme’s functions.php file:

add_filter( "the_excerpt", "add_class_to_excerpt" );
function add_class_to_excerpt( $excerpt ) {
    return str_replace('<p', '<p class="excerpt"', $excerpt);
}

With the above code, all excerpts would be surrounded by a paragraph tag with the class “excerpt” which could now be styled using CSS like so:

.excerpt {
  font-size: 14px;
  line-height: 20px;
  background: #eee;
  padding: 10px;
  border: 1px solid #e2e2e2;
  text-shadow: 1px 1px 0 #fff;
  color: #444;
  }