I recently finished two sites which use <?php the_excerpt(); ?> in postformat.php, but I'm having conflicting behavior on them.

One site creates an excerpt from content if excerpt window is left empty, but gives priority to content in the excerpt window when filled. The other simply ignores all content and only looks at the excerpt window. So when the excerpt window is left empty, no content shows in postformat.

Which of the two is the expected behavior of <?php the_excerpt(); ?>?

That second behavior sounds strange. I would think something would get displayed. According to the Wordpress Codex, the_excerpt() is supposed to output the contents of the Excerpt field if present, otherwise it outputs a trimmed down version of the post content:

It uses get_the_excerpt() to first generate a trimmed-down version of the full post content should there not be an explicit excerpt for the post.

This is the behavior that I see on my test site, i.e., I see either the content of my Excerpt field, if populated, or the first 55 words of the post content.

CrouchingBruin is right in the way it should work

Have you (debugging 101) disabled ALL plugins?
Does the issue happen for every post?
If you create a manual excerpt does it show up?

if none of these questions pushes you to a solution, please export your Monetzuma settings and attach them to a reply

Originally Posted by juggledad

Have you (debugging 101) disabled ALL plugins?

Funny how that goes - that's a question that I'd immediately ask someone else.

To answer it - I did not, at least not before posting the question (facepalm). But now that I did, I found the offending plugin.

The downside (and the upside) is that the culprit plugin is one of ours, lol