Advanced Post Excerpt

by Steve Grunwell

Description

WordPress post excerpts can be a great way to hand-craft the summary of your content. Unfortunately, writing post excerpts isn’t as nice of an experience as what you find elsewhere in WordPress. Want to include links in your excerpts, or bold some text? Hopefully you know some HTML!

Advanced Post Excerpts is designed to change that, by giving your editors an easy, intuitive interface for writing great post excerpts.

For complete details and/or to contribute to ongoing development, please visit this project on GitHub.

Installation

Upload the plugin files into wp-content/plugins/advanced-post-excerpt.
Activate the plugin through the WordPress “Plugins” screen.

Screenshots

The Advanced Post Excerpt meta box, replacing the standard WordPress post excerpt.

Faq

Can I limit the post types that get the advanced editor?

Absolutely! Before the native “Excerpt” meta box is overridden, Advanced Post Excerpt passes an array of post types to the ape_post_types filter.

If, for instance, you only want the native “post” post type to use Advanced Post Excerpt, you can add the following to your theme’s functions.php file:

/**
 * Restrict Advanced Post Excerpt to the "post" post type.
 *
 * @param array $post_types Post types affected by Advanced Post Excerpt.
 * @return array A restricted version of $post_types containing only "post".
 */
function mytheme_restrict_ape_post_types( $post_types ) {
    return array( 'post' );
}
add_filter( 'ape_post_types', 'mytheme_restrict_ape_post_types' );

Will this work with the WordPress block editor (a.k.a. “Gutenberg”)?

Yes! As of version 1.0.0, Advanced Post Excerpt will continue to display the TinyMCE editor in a meta box at the bottom of the block editor. To avoid conflicts, the default “Post Excerpt” panel in the block editor’s sidebar will automatically be removed.

Reviews

Perfect!!!

By bonnie333 on March 9, 2024

Perfect!!!

Advanced Post Excerpt, Where have you been all my life?

By Becky Melton (beckymelton1949) on October 17, 2020

This plugin resolves the most frustrating part of blog excerpts. (no HTML formatting) This makes post archive pages so much more versatile. Thanks for this plugin!

Perfect

By Eddie B (eddiebernard) on July 18, 2020

A simple plugin that does exactly what it says in the description. I now have the ability to have rich text editing in my post excerpt... exactly what I wanted. Many thanks to the author!

Just what I was looking for - and it works perfectly.

By Gabor Lippert (lunule) on September 3, 2016

Oh, and special thanks for lifting the excerpt field up from the page bottom - that position was really annoying.

Changelog

For a full list of changes, please see the full changelog on GitHub.

1.0.0

Added compatibility with the WordPress block editor (a.k.a. “Gutenberg”).
Bumped minimum PHP version to 7.0.

0.2.1

Ensured that the plugin was localization-ready.

0.2.0

Removed left, center, and right alignment buttons from the default post excerpt editor. If desired, these can be restored with a single line of code.

0.1.0

Initial public release.