Question

currently my wordpress theme shows all the words in a post on the homepage, even of very long posts. I would like to limit that to a reasonable number lets say 1500 words max to be shown on the home page, then there should be a “read more” link underneath.
Im using the toolbox theme heres the 1. content.php and 2 index.php.

1. https://i.stack.imgur.com/rUWZv.png 
2. https://i.stack.imgur.com/YrZGS.png 

Answer 1

You could use the ‘insert more tag’ in the wordpress WYSIWYG.

Otherwise you could use something like this to limit the word count:

//define the number of words
$length = 1500;
$text = "Lorem Ipsum dolar sit amet etc etc"; //this would contain the article you are pulling from the database and syntax will depend largely on your theme.

$shortened = implode(' ',array_slice(str_word_count($text,1),0,$length));

echo $shortened . ' ...';

(Take this as pseudocode for now as I dont have time to test it.)

Then link to the article:

<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">read more</a>