Increase product excerpt default length in Single Product template and block

[kmanijak]

Submission Review Guidelines:

• I have followed the WooCommerce Contributing Guidelines and the WordPress Coding Standards.
• I have checked to ensure there aren't other open Pull Requests for the same update/change.
• I have reviewed my code for security best practices.
• Following the above guidelines will result in quick merges and clear and detailed feedback when appropriate.

Changes proposed in this Pull Request:

In #44260 we discuss Product Summary Block: character limit and rendering behavior of different scenarios. We highlight multiple issues, among others that product summary is truncated.

There's multiple requirements to be addressed (it will be taken in multiple steps):

• support WYSWIG styling from product editor
• support option to NOT truncate the summary at all
• more.

The above requires multiple actions and more research that I'm working on. However, in the meantime the least we can do is increase the word limit in Product Summary (core/post-excerpt variation) to the maximum by default. I wanted to set the limit higher (I even used "Infinity" 😅 ), but unfortunately, there's a max set in edit in Gutenberg here. So even if I put higher value (e.g. 10000), it's shows like this, which I think is very misleading especially that you cannot achieve the 10000 any other way except for inserting a block:

Hence, setting it to 100.

This PR covers three places where Product Summary is used:

• Single Product block
• default blockified Single Product template
• the transformation of a classic Single Product template into blockified Single Product template

The PR doesn't cover Product Summary in Products (Beta) and Product Collection blocks. I kept the default value of 55 there.

How to test the changes in this Pull Request:

Using the WooCommerce Testing Instructions Guide, include your detailed testing instructions:

Prerequisites:
0. Edit some product and add some description longer than 100 words:

Example content

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus sed nibh blandit, sodales enim aliquet, ultricies ligula. Praesent enim lectus, gravida a sapien eget, venenatis tempor ligula. Etiam cursus, nisl id molestie rutrum, ex velit volutpat arcu, at blandit quam lectus ut urna. Sed at venenatis turpis, convallis laoreet ante. Nulla lobortis odio non est eleifend, eu vulputate arcu pharetra. Pellentesque porta ante non mauris rutrum consectetur. Quisque nulla neque, vestibulum sed consectetur eget, pellentesque quis felis. Nullam maximus felis neque, a efficitur velit venenatis vitae. Praesent elit sem, bibendum id malesuada sit amet, tristique non turpis. Vivamus varius venenatis sem auctor semper. Cras imperdiet risus diam, sit amet tincidunt dui dictum posuere.

Duis ut tellus fermentum arcu efficitur posuere. Sed tincidunt, nulla a porttitor sagittis, felis felis condimentum felis, ut bibendum augue lacus eu orci. Vestibulum consequat condimentum viverra. Duis pharetra turpis vel varius malesuada. Quisque id velit id.

Scenario 1 - transform classic template into blockified

1. Go to Editor -> Single Product template
2. Remove the content and insert "WooCommerce Single Product Block"
3. Hover over it and click "Transform into blocks"
4. Enter "Code Editor" mode
5. Look for "post-except"
6. Make sure it has "excerptLength":100

7. Save and visit product with longer description on the frontend
8. Make sure it's truncated on 100 words not 55 (no need to count words, asses the "volume" of the text based on below screenshots 🙌 )

Before	After

Scenario 2 - default template

1. Clear customizations on Single Product template
2. Repeat steps 4 - 8 from Scenario 1

Scenario 3 - Single Product block

1. Add new post
2. Add Single Product block
3. Choose product with longer description
4. Focus on "Product Summary" block
5. Make sure Inspector Controls show max words 100 by default

6. Save and go to frontend
7. Make sure it's truncated on 100 words, not 55 (no need to count words, asses the "volume" of the text based on above screenshots 🙌 )

Changelog entry

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Significance

• Patch
• Minor
• Major

Type

• Fix - Fixes an existing bug
• Add - Adds functionality
• Update - Update existing functionality
• Dev - Development related task
• Tweak - A minor adjustment to the codebase
• Performance - Address performance issues
• Enhancement - Improvement to existing functionality

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[github-actions]

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[github-actions]

Hi @ObliviousHarmony,

Apart from reviewing the code changes, please make sure to review the testing instructions as well.

You can follow this guide to find out what good testing instructions should look like:
https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/wiki/Writing-high-quality-testing-instructions

[ObliviousHarmony]

Howdy @kmanijak,

I've gone through the testing instructions and have encountered some issues!

Scenario 1 - transform classic template into blockified

• No Short Description: Unfortunately, this truncates at 55 words still.
• Short Description: When the short description is present it truncates at 100 as expected.

Scenario 2 - default template

• The behavior of Scenario 2 is the same as Scenario 1.

Scenario 3 - Single Product block

• While the excerpt block shows 100 as the value the behavior is still the same as the other two scenarios.

[kmanijak]

No Short Description: Unfortunately, this truncates at 55 words still.

Great catch @ObliviousHarmony!

I did some digging and the truncation happens in WordPress itself:

• in get_post_excerpt we read:

If this function is used outside The Loop and the post doesn’t have a custom excerpt, this function will use wp_trim_excerpt() to generate an excerpt.

• then in wp_trim_excerpt:

Returns a maximum of 55 words with an ellipsis appended if necessary.
The 55-word limit can be modified by plugins/themes using the ‘excerpt_length’ filter.

The same happens on trunk if the user manually sets the excerpt length to a value higher than 55, excerpt length will be "ignored" if there's no short description and content is truncated to 55 internally. I recommend progressing with the PR to improve the behavior at least in some cases.

I'll contribute upstream to add excerpt_length filter in post-excerpt.

As I wrote in the PR description, this is just short-term improvement and I'm focusing on providing an alternative solution to core/post-excerpt variation.

[kmanijak]

Made a contribution to Gutenberg fixing the problem: WordPress/gutenberg#61888

[ObliviousHarmony]

Thanks for looking into that and submitting an upstream fix @kmanijak 😄

Since we can't fix that edge case, let's go ahead with this!