There are tons of people looking for excerpt plugins for Wordpress. It took me a long while to find the ones that I liked the best. I was looking for excerpt plugins for one of my newer blogs a month ago. These are some of my favorite ones I found.
Post Teaser – Post Teaser generates a preview or “teaser” of a post for the main, archive and category pages, with a link underneath to go to the full post page. It includes features to generate a word count, image count, and an estimated reading time.
wp-utf8-excerpt – It supports multibyte language (such as Chinese). It will not produce gibberish as some other excerpt plugins do. The html tags in the original posts, i.e., the font styles, colors, hyperlinks, pictures and such are preserved in the excerpt. For better readability, it displays 300 characters for each post on the homepage and 150 characters for each post on archive pages.
QF-GetThumb – QF-GetThumb is plugin to make the thumbnail and the cache of first image data in the content and the argument source.This plugin can make JPEG, GIF, a format of PNG, And makes the image of not only a local server but also the outside link a thumbnail and can become cache. Outside RSS can be read depending on the application.
PJW Page Excerpt – This plugin allows you to specify a specifc excerpt for WordPress pages. The plugin adds an extra box to the set an Optional Excerpt for a WordPress page similar to the box which is available for posts.
Content and Excerpt Word Limit – Allows users to limit the number or words that are displayed when they want the excerpt or content of a post to appear. Instead of the_excerpt() or the_content(), use or within your loop to limit the words for each.
Custom Excerpts – Custom Excerpts allows you to implement custom excerpt text, length, and to choose HTML tags to allow and whether to make the link nofollow or dofollow. Previously the only way to achieve this was to edit the WordPress core file formatting.php which meant changes would be lost after each update.
Excerpt Editor – Excerpt Editor provides a convenient place for creating and editing all excerpts. It can also add custom excerpts for pages (not possible without a plugin).
I’m still looking for better excerpt plugins so if you know of any let me know. Wordpress is a great blog platform, but not being able to easily edit your excerpt has been a disadvantage. However, Wordpress at least allows people to create their own plugins which makes it all that much better.
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Good list.
There’s also the homepage excerpts plugin which lets you post excerpts on the homepage (can tweak if it should be all or just a few posts).
These are all excellent excerpt plug-ins. Definitely most useful for the serious blogger. Custom excerpts are wonderful, as they allow for a more customizable formatting. Thanks!
Another very useful excerpt plugin is the_excerpt_reloaded. I regularly use this plugin to customise WP sites.
Hi Franklin, thanks for the list. I know you’re a Thesis fan, and I’ve just taken the decision to start using it too. If you’re a visitor to the Thesis forum you’d probably be aware of all the gripes about the lack of solutions to post teasers in 2nd, 3rd or 4th columns. Have you tried out any of these above? What do you think of them as a solution to the Thesis issue? Good luck.