How to bold words in Food item descriptions, add paragraph breaks, etc.

[Fred Rogers]

Hi, Bill, and welcome to this week’s dumbest question.
At the very bottom of the link above in the Wines section, I need to bold the different wine types, add spaces or bullets for each wine name and insert paragraph breaks between the different wine type segments. This would normally be accomplished using tags in the Text section of a post but Food entries aren’t technically posts, are they? Thanks for your help and your time!

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Fred,

Excellent question. The food section is built using WordPress’ excerpt function which strips out everything but text.

There is a plugin called Advanced Excerpt (https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-excerpt/) that lets you use HTML inside of excerpts. You should be able to use it to insert various elements of HTML into the food descriptions.

What you could do is make the list in a page’s main content box. Then once you have it set like you want it, click on the text tab at the top right of the main content area. This will give you the text you just created in HTML. Copy that out and then use it as the description of your wine item. The plugin should allow you to keep the styling you’ve added.

Hope that helps out. Let me know if I can help,
Bill

[Fred Rogers]

Thanks, Bill! I did that and have the HTML for the list formatted the way I want it to be but I don’t know where to add it in the food item (Drinks/Wine) that I need to update. The individual food items don’t have a text/HTML option.
Also, when I activated that plugin it replaced the descriptions of all of my Food items (not just Drinks) with three dashes. On a hunch I deactivated it and all of the descriptions thankfully reappeared. I checked the plugin FAQ and changelog and there’s nothing in either to indicate what I messed up. 😉

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Fred,

That plugin is intended to allow you to place HTML directly into the excerpt box. It won’t change the appearance at all, just supposedly allow more HTML through.

I haven’t tested it though with this theme. It’s possible that it doesn’t work. If that’s the case then there may not be a way to add another else to a food description.

You might want to just edit the page-menu-list.php file and hard code it in just above this line:

</div><!-- #content -->

Take care,
Bill

[Fred Rogers]

I’ll try that. Thank you, sir. Yes, several times before when I’ve seen a cascade type of failure like that it’s because the plugin doesn’t get along with the theme. Nerts.
On an unrelated note, can I delete the other themes that keep popping up whenever I update WordPress . . . Twenty Thirteen, Twenty Fourteen and Twenty Fifteen?

[Bill Robbins]

You can safely delete those themes. I generally leave one of them around in case something ever goes very wrong unintentionally. That way there is a fallback. Any you do keep around it’s good to keep updated even if they aren’t active. Since they are on literally tens of millions of sites out there, in the rare event a security flaw is discovered, there will be bots hunting for them.

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