Question

I’ve taken over and built a new theme utilizing all the goodies WordPress comes with. I’m also using the built-in excerpts functions within WordPress… however, the previous user wasn’t using automatic excerpts and was manually typing their own excerpts.

I was wondering if there is a method to either override the manual excerpts or to perform a bulk edit on the excerpts?

Answer 1

Use the query

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_excerpt=''

in phpmyadmin. Change the table prefix in the query if the default prefix of wp_ isn’t being used. Backup your database first.

Or:

If you don’t want to use phpmyadmin, run the MySQL query as a $wpdb PHP function.

Put this at the bottom (or top) of your functions.php file and reload the site:

$wpdb->query( "UPDATE wp_posts SET post_excerpt='' " ); 

Or put this in a template file, like index.php, and reload the page:

<?php $wpdb->query( "UPDATE wp_posts SET post_excerpt='' " ); ?>

And of course, remove either of those PHP functions from the file after you run them.

Edit: and, it’s a good idea to select for the post type of posts when using the query, as Murilo Pontes in his answer; otherwise, plugins and other functions that may use the excerpt for data storage will lose their data.