I setup a new theme on the site today; Mystique.  One thing that I didn’t like with it was the lack of a “more” link after the excerpts on the front page, so I made a quick edit to functions.php & core.php to re-enable this feature.

core.php

[sourcecode language=”php” highlight=”765,766,767,768″ firstline=”761″ toolbar=”false”]
function mystique_excerpt_more($excerpt) {
$link = ‘ … <a href="’.get_permalink().’">’.__(‘More &gt;’, ‘mystique’).'</a>’;
}

function mystique_the_excerpt($excerpt) {
$link = substr($excerpt, 0, -5).’ <a href="’.get_permalink().’">’.__(‘More &gt;’, ‘mystique’).'</a></p>’;
return $link;
}
[/sourcecode]

functions.php

[sourcecode language=”php” highlight=”82″ firstline=”81″ toolbar=”false”]
add_filter(‘excerpt_more’, ‘mystique_excerpt_more’);
add_filter(‘the_excerpt’, ‘mystique_the_excerpt’);
[/sourcecode]

Such a simple change, but it took absolutely ages to work out what I needed to change & where.  What this does is inserts the MORE string into the excerpt itself as part of the_except(), rather than excerpt_more(), which is only appended to automatically generated excerpts; so if you happen to have written an excerpt for a post it would not show the MORE message for any of those posts.