Post subtitle
Rural Blog adds a Subtitle field to every post. It prints as one line under the post title on the single post, and it is the fastest way to make a post look edited rather than typed.
Writing one
In the post editor, the Post options box in the settings sidebar:
Subtitle — Shown under the title on the single post. Leave empty to hide.
Type a line, save the post. Nothing appears if you leave it empty.
If you do not see the box, open the settings sidebar (the gear icon) and scroll past the standard panels — it is a classic metabox and sits below them. Under Options (⋮) → Preferences → Panels you can confirm it is enabled.
Writing a good one
A subtitle is a deck: the line a magazine puts under a headline to say what the piece actually covers. It is not a repeat of the title and not a summary of the whole post.
Bad:
Title: Three days in Lisbon Subtitle: Three days in Lisbon
Better:
Title: Three days in Lisbon Subtitle: What to eat, where to walk, and the one hill worth the climb.
One sentence. No full stop is fine. Around 8–15 words.
Where it appears
On the single post only, under the <h1>, above the featured image.
It is not printed in the listing — a listing already has an excerpt doing that job, and two summaries per entry is one too many.
It follows the header alignment with the rest of the header block.
Styling it
Customize → Design → Single post → Subtitle font. Face, size, weight, letter spacing, case and line height.
| Field | Default |
|---|---|
| Face | Same as base font |
| Size | 1.1em |
| Weight | Same as base |
| Letter spacing | 0 |
| Case | Same as base |
| Line height | 1.5 |
The face defaults to the base font rather than the heading font, because a deck reads as part of the article’s prose, not as a second headline. Setting it to Same as heading font at a light weight is the other classic treatment.
A muted colour helps it sit back from the title. There is no dedicated picker;
apply one with a line of custom CSS on
.entry-subtitle if you want it.
In bulk
The field is standard post meta under the key _rural_blog_subtitle, so WP-CLI
can set it:
wp post meta update 123 _rural_blog_subtitle "One line of deck"
Useful when seeding a demo site or backfilling an import.