Edit a post and find the Subtitle box. Type one line. It prints under the headline, above the byline.
Appearance → Customize → Single Post → Show subtitle (top) switches the display off without deleting what you have written.
What it is for
The thing a newspaper calls a standfirst: one sentence that makes the case for reading the story. The headline says what happened; the subtitle says why it matters, or who it happened to, or what is at stake.
The bridge that took forty years
Two councils, three public enquiries and one extremely patient engineer.
It is plain text — no links, no markup — and it is not the excerpt. The excerpt is what shows in a listing; the subtitle is what shows on the article. Writing both is worth the minute it costs, because they are doing different jobs.
Posts only
The field is on posts. It is not on pages: a headline device belongs to a story, not to an About page.
If you wrote a subtitle on a page before 1.4.1, when the field was broader, the value is still in the database and simply not printed. Nothing was deleted.
A child theme or plugin can hand the field back to pages, or give it to a custom post type, with the stoat_subtitle_post_types filter:
add_filter( 'stoat_subtitle_post_types', function ( $types ) {
$types[] = 'page';
return $types;
} );
It survives a theme switch
The subtitle is stored under _owldraft_subtitle — namespaced to OwlDraft rather than to Stoat — so subtitles written here are read by every OwlDraft theme. Moving between them keeps what you wrote.
Writing one
- One line. Two is a paragraph, and the post already has paragraphs.
- Do not repeat the headline in longer words. It is the commonest mistake and the easiest to spot: read them aloud together.
- Do not tease. “The answer may surprise you” is not a subtitle.
- A name, a number or a place is usually the strongest thing to put in it.