WordPress MU

I use <?php the_excerpt();?> in my blog homepage.
What I want is that instead of displaying the teaser i.e first 55 words of my post it should display say 20 words.

Is there a way to do this or some other template tag to make this possible.

you can manually fill in the exact excerpt you want in the excerpt field under the post. Otherwise, it uses the default.

http://chrismeller.com/changing-the-length-of-the_excerpt-in-wordpress

Put in your home theme's function.php file or in a .php file of its own in mu-plugins.

I do something similar for my tag pages and whatnot.

Hey Klarko, thanks. God knows why but this does not work for me.
I am on 2.6 and tried it in functions.php as well as mu-plugins. Doesn't work man .

Here's my code.

<?php

remove_filter(‘get_the_excerpt’, ‘wp_trim_excerpt’);

function new_excerpt($text) { // Fakes an excerpt if needed
	if ( '' == $text ) {
		$text = get_the_content('');

		$text = strip_shortcodes( $text ); 

		$text = apply_filters('the_content', $text);
		$text = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $text);
		$text = strip_tags($text);
		$excerpt_length = 25;
		$words = explode(' ', $text, $excerpt_length + 1);
		if (count($words) > $excerpt_length) {
			array_pop($words);
			array_push($words, '[...]');
			$text = implode(' ', $words);
		}
	}
	return $text;
}

add_filter(‘get_the_excerpt’, ‘new_excerpt’);
?>