Advanced Excerpt plugin for WordPress

Alan on August 25th, at 2:53 am •

So, whatever happened to that improved image manipulation plugin I commissioned you to do some billion years ago?

Bas on August 25th, at 1:18 pm •

Well, someone else did it.

Alan on August 29th, at 6:09 am •

… blasphemy.

Keith Messinger on September 7th, at 4:02 am •

Hi. I was hoping to get an excerpt to display on my website and then when someone clicked on see all, to open my WordPress Blog on a separate page. Is this possible? I have checked your excerpts and can’t see a link for the excerpt.

I want to use the same technique in http://www.thelasteurovan.com, a site that is being rebuilt.

Your assistance is greatly needed and will be greatly appreciated!

Regards,
Keith

Bas on September 7th, at 9:30 am •

Keith, displaying a single post on a separate page is also done by the theme (that is, some themes do this, some don’t). WordPress will automatically try to use a template file called single.php.

You can add a link to this page using the the_permalink() template function in after (or before, whatever you like) the_excerpt(). Like so:
<?php the_excerpt(); ?><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ? rel="nofollow">">Read the rest...</a>

I hope this answers your question.

Keith Messinger on September 7th, at 3:56 pm •

Thanks Bas. I will try to muddle thru that!

James Bisset on September 22nd, at 4:24 am •

Great idea for a plugin Bas, and when I stumbled across it I banged it straight into my blog.

But, the few posts that I’ve made where I actually wrote an ‘excerpt’ displayed nothing in the list of posts when I activated your plugin. Any chance of an if statement in the code which will display a plain old excerpt if one exists, else do that funky stuff?

Bas on September 26th, at 5:14 pm •

Thanks for pointing that out to me, James. I think I have found the problem and I have updated the plugin.

You should be able to download it from the WordPress plugin page shortly.

Brad on October 17th, at 5:32 am •

Great excerpt plugin. Was hoping two questions could be answered.
One, can I somehow specify a different length for an excerpt at onne location on my site compared to another?
Two, is there anyway to have it add a ‘more’ link after the text. Doing this manually with a permalink after the php code puts the ‘rmore’ link on a new line. Thanks again!

James Bisset on November 9th, at 1:46 am •

Thanks for the earlier fix Bas, but here’s another teaser for you.

I know I’m probably being ambitious here, but I’m trying to use excerpts as an elegant way of presenting a menu of child ‘pages’ on a parent ‘page’. And I’ve hit exactly the same problem again - this time for a client.

I’ve got an example page where I’ve hard-coded the result I want to see, and below that generated some ‘the_excerpt()’ to create the same result.

But as before, I’m getting the auto-generated excerpts instead. If you view any of the child pages, you’ll see that the real excerpt is available, I just can’t seem to get at it on the parent page.

I found the code for listing child page excerpts on the Wordpress forum.

Freakiest thing is that Wordpress 2.3.1 seems to display html excerpts even without your plugin, which is currently deactivated on that site.

James Bisset on November 9th, at 2:03 am •

Sorry - not quite sure what I did there, but the link to the example doesn’t work. Here it is again.

example page

James Bisset on November 18th, at 5:32 am •

Resolved.

Looks like my issue might be a bug in Wordpress 2.3.1.

See this thread on the Wordpress forum

Marc Fiszman on December 4th, at 11:32 pm •

Bas — great plugin, thanks But I’ve just noticed that it doesn’t seem to be working any more.

Do you know if it should be compatible with WP 2.3.1?

Bas on December 4th, at 11:38 pm •

I have not tried using it under 2.3 yet, so I don’t know. WP might have changed some things in the handling of excerpts. I will check it out as soon as I get the opportunity.

Tench on December 5th, at 3:35 pm •

Is there a way to pass parameters to the plugin, i.e. to choose the length of the excerpt in the template where it’s used, and not only on the options page in WP?

jack on December 11th, at 10:13 pm •

I was messing around with the sp_excerpt_reloaded thing until I stumbled over your plugin Excellent!

I’m using WP2.3.1 and have two remarks for now:
1. When choosing characters instead of words something goes wrong. I tried 100, 150 or 200, but the loading of the page stops somewhere in the middle. In this case a searchresult of 70 posts, split into two pages by using the different-posts-per-page plugin. When choosing ‘words’ everything works ok.
2. Perhaps a ‘deselect all’ or ‘invert selection’ for the html tags?

Anyway, I’m very happy with it!

Bas on December 11th, at 10:17 pm •

I still have to find some time to look into 2.3 compatibility. I will also take above suggestions/reports into account.
Anyway, glad you like the plugin.

Ted Bilmer on December 31st, at 11:14 am •

I’ve been going round and round and click all the links but can’t find the download link for Advanced Excerpt plugin. This may sound silly but I tried many times, looked into the archives etc but to no avail.

Bas on December 31st, at 5:57 pm •

Sorry about that. It is back now.

ovidius on January 1st, at 5:35 am •

The plugin doesn’t work with WordPress version 2.3.2 (but with 2.3.1 does work yet). The plugin does not work after update to version 2.3.2, I don’t know why. It’s sadly.

Jim Gore on January 9th, at 5:10 pm •

I found under 2.3.1, it kinda works. I suspect problems with
“options-advancedexcerpt”, because with a few experiments I can see that the plugin is having some effect. But if I add something under “keep markup”, that doesn’t appear to be effective. I can deactivate, reactivate, and remove some markup, and many, but not all, markup features are carried forward.

I’d be happy to work with the developer to further test - if that would be helpful (but if things changed again at 2.3.2, I wouldn’t want you to spend time on 2.3.1.

LastBlogger on February 2nd, at 2:25 pm •

it doesnt work on 2.3.2
I’ll try to see if I can fix it, I really need this one

Istvan on February 20th, at 6:57 pm •

On my blog I’m using a video plugin, so that you can insert a video simply typing [youtube 012321312]. How can I avoid the display of these in the excerpt? It works with the default wp excerpt, but I need your plugin to make the text shorter…

Thank

Bas on February 20th, at 7:58 pm •

@ Istvan The HTML markup for embedding Youtube videos (and Flash in general) requires embed/object tags. The plugin filters these tags automatically unless they are part of the allowed tags list (which they are not by default in WordPress).

From your comment I assume the video does show up, though.
There are about a dozen video plugins out there, so I can’t pinpoint the exact cause of the problem. However, I have two ideas about what might be happening.

Some of those plugins work by replacing the [youtube] code with a div or link formatted with a special class. JavaScript is then used to replace this with the proper embed/object/param tagsoup. It’s likely that the excerpt plugin does not remove this element (it was designed to preserve HTML, so don’t blame it ;)), resulting in the video showing up anyway.
Finding out which element is used for this and disabling it in the excerpt options can be a solution. The drawback is that other usages of this element will also be stripped from the excerpt.

It could also be possible that the video plugin filter has an even lower priority than the excerpt filter, resulting in the [youtube] code replacement taking place after the excerpt creation.

If you can tell me which video plugin you are using, I can give a better answer and perhaps provide a working solution.

@ Jim Gore Thanks for pointing out that problem. It’s tricky to keep up with WordPress’ developments (they’re much faster than me doing this in my spare time) so it’s certainly plausible that options handling is ahead of the current plugin by now. I’ll have a look at it as soon as I can.

Chad on February 22nd, at 9:04 pm •

I would like to know the same as Brad. Is there an input for your plug-in so i can specify the number of characters/words being used in different excerpts?

eligio on March 2nd, at 5:00 am •

the plugins works great on my new technology blog noobgeek.com . thanks for the wonderful plugins

Misser on March 11th, at 1:49 am •

Hi, thanks for your brilliant work. There’s only one problem: I’m writing in Chinese, and the encode is UTF-8, when I use advanced excerpt, the feed goes wrong. I got such kind of error message: “‘utf8′ codec can’t decode bytes in position 5516-5518: invalid data (maybe a high-bit character?)” I guess there is some wrong with the cut off characters, say, where the “… read more…” should be. I will be really thankful if you can check out this, thanks

Gerome Freeman on March 26th, at 10:15 pm •

So this plugin doesn’t support the tag? What’s up with that and is their a workaround if I have a bunch content with span-styled text I need to display in the excerpt?

Michael Benson on April 4th, at 2:08 am •

Hey, I have been previously using the_excerpt_reloaded plugin but it seems to have some conflict with Wordpress 2.5, and so have found the Advanced Excerpt plugin. However, off first glance does there appear to be a way to use the Advanced Excerpt in completely different scenarios?

For instance, I would like to display so words, and allow certain HTML tags in three different instances, and would usually just use a PHP call - but since yours is done through the Wordpress Admin Control Panel, and only appears to allow for one setting, is this still possible?

Bas on April 4th, at 7:21 pm •

@Michael — I added something along the lines of what you suggested in version 0.2 of this plugin. It is now possible to call the filter function anywhere using custom parameters.
Check the FAQ at the WordPress Plugins page for instructions.
Version 0.2 should be available for download there any minute from now.

Olivier César on April 10th, at 4:11 pm •

Nice nice nice…

Installed the plugin, changed th ‘the_content’ by ‘the_excerpt’ and tada….. working….

But.. Where is my Read More link in the post on the front page???

Cannot see it..

Idea ??

Bas on April 10th, at 4:54 pm •

You can manually add a read more link in your template file(s) using the_permalink().

Olivier César on April 10th, at 6:51 pm •

Ok, I not an expert inPHP.. if you could email me and tell me how to do it, I would the happiest man in the world

Alejandro Martínez on April 15th, at 5:35 pm •

Hi,
For me is not working… (bloghogwarts.com), the tag still appearing.. (WordPress 2.5)

Thanks,
Alex

Alejandro Martínez on April 15th, at 5:39 pm •

Forgot it, fixed

Jimmy on April 15th, at 5:51 pm •

I installed the plugin on a 2.5 wordpress and despite I changed the settings in the option menu numerous times, nothing actually happens on the front-end.

The code in the template is (which I think should be the right one)

Is this a known thing or am I doing something really stupid?

anthony on April 22nd, at 9:18 pm •

Hi Bas, can you give me an example of how to implement the code manually on a specific page template. I’ve seen the documentation on the wordpress site but i can’t seem to get it to work. here’s what i tried.

filter(the_content()[,250, 1, 'read full article', null]) ?>

Bas on April 23rd, at 12:01 am •

@ anthony — using the filter manually is possible as of version 0.1.1. Please refer to the plugin FAQ for instructions.

No Named Anonymous Booger on April 23rd, at 4:06 am •

The plugin FAQ may be clear to you, but not everyone has your knowledge , which is why you were asked for a clear cut example of where and how to place the code in index.php or single.php or wherever.
$advancedexcerpt-> is confusing.

Maybe English is not your native language, but Anthony read the plugin FAQ already and does not understand your instructions. Which is why he came here and gave you an example of how he tried to implement the “instructions” from the FAQ.

Just to be clear this code
$advancedexcerpt->filter($text[, $length, $use_words, $ellipsis, $allowed_tags])
as presented in the FAQ gives this error
PHP Parse error: parse error, unexpected ‘,’, expecting ‘]’

From there I and others do not know what to do. Your plugin seems to be a solution to many issues, but without your help we won’t be able to implement it properly.

Will you please provide and example of the code presented in the FAQ as it would be used in a template?
An example of 40 length, not using words, no elipsis and IMG and P as allowed_tags
Thanks.

anthony on April 30th, at 12:58 am •

Please Please Please !Bas! - my clients waiting on this bit of code…..

Bas on April 30th, at 1:34 am •

@anthony — The FAQ describes how the function works.
To manually excerpt the content of a post, you could use the following code:
< ?php echo $advancedexcerpt->filter(the_content()); ?>
The square brackets seen in the FAQ indicate that the enclosed parameters are optional, the square brackets should not appear in your code.

Here is another example (the corrected version of the code you posted previously, which I misread because I was in a hurry):
< ?php $advancedexcerpt->filter(the_content(),250, 1, ‘read full article’, null) ?>

Note: Mind the space before ?php and the fancy quotes when copying.

Frank on May 4th, at 1:16 am •

Above someone asked about the compatibility of advanced excerpt with the output of an embedded video. I’m having the same issue, and wonder if you could help.

I’m using Viper’s Video Quicktags

Basically, the excerpt will not show the embedded content. Instead, it shows the output of the shortcut used to place the video in to begin with. Whenever there is a video, the excerpt outputs, for example, [googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=videoid[/googlevideo].

Is there a way to get this to render, instead of the code, the embedded content?

Bas on May 4th, at 12:18 pm •

@Frank — Thanks for pointing me at the conflicting plugin, now I can see what’s going on. What’s basically happening is that my plugin uses the get_the_content() function to retrieve the full unmodified post to create an excerpt from. The video plugin applies a filter to ‘the_content’. However, this filter is only applied when the_content() function is called. So the video plugin has no effect on the excerpt generated by my plugin.

Anyway, technical details aside, I should be able to resolve the problem, so expect an update on this.

Bas on May 4th, at 2:15 pm •

The update is out. The embedded video problem should be resolved.

Frank on May 4th, at 3:02 pm •

Bas, excellent job! The update works for me. Thanks for taking the time to do it.

Luke on May 11th, at 1:34 pm •

Hi Bas, where’s the download link..? I can’t find it anywhere

Bas on May 11th, at 2:48 pm •

I don’t know how it disappeared, but it’s back.

Alexandar Tzanov on May 12th, at 6:29 pm •

The plugin doesn’t seem to handle tags like and , which come with the embed code from youtube for example. Is there a way to quickly modify the plugin to handle such tags.

Alexandar Tzanov on May 12th, at 6:30 pm •

the system tool out the tags. here they are - and

Alexandar Tzanov on May 12th, at 6:31 pm •

ok, third time is a charm: embed and object

Addie on May 14th, at 5:00 pm •

Hi the plugin is great, but I have a problem: I use images in my posts, and the first image open at its real size in exceprt and that makes my site look ugly. How can I set up the excerpt to display a thumbnail of my image and not the whole original size?

Bas on May 15th, at 3:22 pm •

This plugin makes excerpts, not thumbnails. You can always create your own excerpt with a thumbnail image manually in the post editor.

hpguru on May 16th, at 10:00 am •

Great plugin. Thanks very much. Good work.

Rebecca on May 20th, at 3:39 pm •

I can’t get the plugin to work. I’m using 2.5.1 and used the example from the posts to insert the code into my template. Where is version 0.2 the only version i can find on your website or the wordpress plugin site is version 0.1.2. Thanks for your help

Mitch on May 29th, at 2:12 am •

Bas -

Like Rebecca, I seem to be having trouble getting the plugin working on 2.5.1. I’ve loaded the plugin, checked the options, and there simply isn’t anything happening.

I have tried to find another plugin out there and don’t see anything nearly as fully featured as this. I am hopeful that you’ll be able to figure out what’s going on.

Best,

-Mitch

aivan monceller on May 31st, at 2:32 pm •

How can you set advance excerpt not to apply excerpt when the set post length is longer than the original post length. Because it shows the “a2a” text when it happens..

aivan monceller on May 31st, at 3:23 pm •

PS: The center tags for images are not preserved.

nathan on June 24th, at 10:08 pm •

Hi Bas,

When I’m attempting to call the plugin with specific particular parameters as you’ve indicated in your code above, I’m getting both the default excerpt as well as the custom-called excerpt, as seen at dev.lippisreport.com under the Latest Podcasts area. Any idea of what’s happening here?

I notice that if I take out the “echo” bit of your code, it doesn’t display the duplicates, but it also only displays the default excerpt.

Thanks for the plugin, by the way, very cool!

nathan on June 24th, at 10:14 pm •

Okay I’ve discovered the following with your example code:

filter(the_content(),250, 1, ‘read full article’, null) ?>

Where you have `the_content`, I tried replacing that with `the_excerpt` and noticed that the duplicates would either be the entire content or the excerpt, followed by the desired, shortened excerpt.

By replacing `the_content` with `null`, I was able to eliminate the duplicates. Just wanted to mention that, though it doesn’t seem that anyone else was having that issue…