Unlike previous versions of Joomla, Joomla 1.5 doesn’t allow you to change the “Read more” text … that is, without a simple modification.
What is the ‘Read More’ feature in Joomla?
Joomla allows you to list a selection (or all) of your articles in a blog list. Instead of having the full article visable, you can set the ‘blog view’ to only display the ‘introduction text’ and then be followed by “Read more”.
Why would you do this?
The issue is, does “read more” really communicate to your audience that there is more to the article, perhaps there is a better way to word it?
In my opinion “Read more” doesn’t exactly imply the right thing, when your audience sees it they might assume it will give a list of similar documents. This really comes down to user testing, to see what works best for your audience to increase click-through rates, but it is still important to have the ability to change this text to potentially increase the click-through rates for your website.
How to change the ‘Read more’ text in Joomla 1.5
Please note, you might need to reapply this modification after a Joomla update.
This modification requires a very simple change to one of the Joomla php files, therefore you will need access to the files on the server (through cPanel, web disk, FTP etc).
- Browse to the following folder <server root directory>\components\com_content\views\section\tmpl\
- Find blog_item.php
- Save two copies to the file, call one blog.item.php.backup and the other blog_item.php
- Open the copied blog_item.php with your prefered editor (notepad, Dreamweaver etc)
- Browse to line 150 –
echo JText::sprintf('Read more...'); - Change to –
echo JText::sprintf('Click to continue...'); - Save the changes
- Replace the blog_item.php on the server.