150 Comments

Write one, too!

• 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…

• Frank on July 11th, at 1:09 am •

  Hi. I am getting duplicates of the content?

  I replaced the_content with the_excerpt. Is that right?

• Butch Adams on July 12th, at 3:13 pm •

  This plugin does exactly what I demanded of excerpts. I hated the stripped output and removed the_excerpt() from all my template files. Now I can put them back.

  Outstanding.

  It does have a slight conflict with eventcalendar3 where both the time/date markup and the formated time and date show up in the results. It’s not devestating, so i’ll try to run it down when i have a minute if you have no way to reproduce the error.

• fatihturan on July 12th, at 10:02 pm •

  Hello Bas!

  I want to use your plug-in but it’s not working correct.

  My theme is here and you can look it. If you can see there is a featured post and other posts is showing.

  So i want to show featured post’s excerpt is 370 characters and other post’s excerpt is 239 character.

  I’m using this loop in index.php.

  In shortly filter(the_content(),150, 0, 'asds', null) ?> doesn’t work.

  Please help me.

  Thanks.

• Dave on July 13th, at 6:01 am •

  Bas, this plugin is full of so much great potential, but I have tried everything to get it to work without any success. I know you say it is compatible with 2.5.1 but I don’t believe it is. Unless there is simply wrong with my theme files (which I can’t believe there is) I am not sure what else to say/do. I have tried both the the_excerpt(); option as well as using your api. The traditional method simply doesn’t work. The api method, works to an extent, but it displays the full post and then does the excerpt. Not sure what to make of it, but I know it isn’t right.

• THE FIXER on July 15th, at 8:06 pm •

  Ok, People. I got the fix for you who are running in problems when trying to run the script in php.

  Actually this is a quick hack fix, since i don’t wish to fix it for you, because the author of this script should do it!

  here is the fix and below it i will tell you what it does:
  $looserscriptfix = $post->post_content;
print $advancedexcerpt->filter($$looserscriptfix,10,1,"read full article",null);

  first of all we are creating a variable $looserscriptfix which will hold in the post content.

  Then we need to give the advancedexcerpt the value of this new variable using double dollar signs($$). What this does, is that it gives the actual text held inside of the variable instead of the variable itself. It seems like the function is expecting a string instead of a variable. You can try it by entering a string “fuck this lame script” in the function.

  Thats it. Take care!

• THE FIXER on July 15th, at 8:27 pm •

  you know what, after doing some further investigations with my zero coding skills, i have no idea why the $$ signs works

• THE FIXER on July 15th, at 8:46 pm •

  haha, fuck me… It was just that lack of instructions that made me go nuts with this script.

  Sorry everybode.. Admin please remove my shitty comments.

  What i realized was that you literally put a non assigned variable $text in the function. What is does then is use the original get_the_content() function to fetch the content.

  All this mess could have been avoided with proper faq, or atleast thats my excuse ;D

  this is borrowed from the original FAQ “$text is the full text of whatever you need an excerpt of”. NOW if something then that is very very confusing, because it creates an illusion that you need to pass some data to the function.

  Conclusion: don’t try to pass any data to the function ie. the_content, $post->post_content …

• THE FIXER on July 15th, at 8:48 pm •

  and yes.. remember to print the function !!!

• alvinwong on July 18th, at 11:09 am •

  Hi Bas,

  I am a newbie and do not understand php at all. I have installed your advanced excerpt plugin, activated it and it does not seem to work as all my post seem to have the entire content still listed.

  I have also read through all the above forum including your replies to some who have the same problem as mine.

  I am very sorry. I do not understand how to get it right because I do not get to know what is being taught here by you especially the php lingo.

  Kindly teach me step by step. Thanks

• Li-An on July 21st, at 9:28 am •

  Alvinwong: you have to look in your theme files and search for and replace with . Don’t remember to backup the files before making any change et test on one file to see if it works.

  Bas: as I know, the plugin works great with WP 2.6
  But I NEED a saving of the configuration of the plugin. It’s boring to configure everything each time you disable the plugin

• alvinwong on July 23rd, at 4:58 am •

  Li-An

  Thanks for the reply but I, as informed, do not have any idea how o go about. I had gone into Design—->Theme Editor—>Theme Files and am now lost as to what I need to amend since I don’t have knowledge about html.

  Please advise me “what” to change in the Theme Files.

  Appreciate your help, Li-An.

  Thank you

• alvinwong on July 23rd, at 5:24 am •

  Li-An,

  I also do not having any idea which other template/s I need to change in order to rectify these problems. Additionally, can I re-post the same post contents after deleting the earlier ones (similar posts) and by doing so, would my website be penalized by search engines?

  Please visit my website at for ideas to recommend:- http://www.4life-stay-healthy.com

  Thank you

• K-IntheHouse on July 30th, at 11:05 pm •

  Hi bas,

  I am trying to use the exceprt code in my index.php but it doesn’t work for me.

  Here is the code I have in it:
  
filter(the_content(), 20, 1, 'read more', null) ?>


• Pentti Aitta on August 13th, at 12:56 pm •

  With some of my posts i get the error:

  Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /home/penttiai/public_html/devblog/wp-content/plugins/advanced-excerpt/advanced-excerpt.php on line 116

  or line 118 or similar.

  The problem seems to be related to the counting of characters and not counting the html entities, but i can’t see what could be wrong with my posts.

  For example this post breaks the plugin: http://www.penttiaitta.com/devblog/2008/05/09/hiroshima/ so i have crafted a custom excerpt for that one on this page: http://www.penttiaitta.com/devblog/blogi/page/8/

  But i guess there should be some simple solution for this? Or could it just be some sort of problem with the new versions of worpress? (I have v. 2.6 on my blog)

• Nathan on August 14th, at 5:39 pm •

  This is potentially a great plugin, but it really does need some work, either on the code end or on the documentation.

  With a little work you could see this plugin blowing up.

• Ken on August 15th, at 10:44 pm •

  Is this plugin is good for adding extra text at the end of each post? Do you have an example? Thanks.

• Leon P on September 17th, at 12:42 pm •

  Thanks for this plugin – really handy as I’ve just redesigned a blog with 400+ posts, most of which don’t have a hand-crafted excerpt. I’ve used excerpts to create a large banner above every post. This serves as fix until everything has been excerpted (if that makes sense).

  No problems so far with wp 2.6.1

• dave on September 17th, at 7:07 pm •

  For anyone having trouble using the direct call to this function here is a working example – tested in WP 2.6

  <?php filter($text, 30, 1, '...<a href="'.get_permalink().'" rel="nofollow">read more</a>', null); ?>

  This will cut your post off at 30 words – and place nice link to read more.

  HOPE THAT HELPS. Took me a while to figure it out.

• Joshua U on September 21st, at 12:51 pm •

  Dave, is that a full working example? Because I can’t get it to work.

  Bas, I put the following filter($text, 50, $use_words, $ellipsis, $allowed_tags)'); ?>, but the length variable gets put back to the default I have in the settings page.

• Joshua U on September 21st, at 12:52 pm •

  The code is actually: filter($text, $length, $use_words, $ellipsis, $allowed_tags)'); ?>

• Joshua U on September 21st, at 12:54 pm •

  I’m sorry. Here it is again: <?php the_excerpt('$advancedexcerpt->filter($text, 50, $use_words, $ellipsis, $allowed_tags)'); ?>

• Geschenke on October 4th, at 10:53 pm •

  Excellent Advanced Excerpt plugin for WordPress, I installed on version 2.6.2 latest wordpress version on the plugins section with not problems at all on my wordpress blog, great plugin ! Recommended for bloggers

  Regards,

  Andy

• Joshua U on October 9th, at 10:02 am •

  The plugin never did work for me. I had two instances of it, which had different sizes, on one page. I could only use the default size.

  I got rid of this plugin and instead used the more tag in combination with

  <?php the_content(‘Click to continue’, ‘true’, ‘more_file’); ?>

• Ian on October 18th, at 8:40 pm •

  Jeesh! After an hour I finally got it to work with PHP and WP2.6.2. The API documentation could not have been more misleading. Anyways here’s the first 50 words….
  filter($text,50, 1, ‘…(read more)‘, null) ;
  ?>

  When cutting and pasting, make sure the apostrophes don’t get messed up. they should be forward apostrophes.

  Ian
  ( http://ianandwendy.com/travel )

• Ian on October 18th, at 8:41 pm •

  Let’s try that again.. comments ate it..
  
print $advancedexcerpt->filter($text,50, 1, '...(read more)', null) ;


• Heliologue on October 20th, at 8:58 pm •

  Any chance we can get the cite element listed in the admin interface? I had to manually add it as an acceptable tag, but I think it’s a common-enough element to be included by default.

• Rick on October 23rd, at 4:07 pm •

  This looks good, just one question. How can I arrange so that the “Read More” link only gets displayed if there is actually more to read. I have an application which has some very short posts and don’t want the user to see “Read more” if there is no more.

• Andrea on October 30th, at 6:05 pm •

  Hi Bas!
  I’ve been using your plugin for many months, it’s fantastic. Now i need to use the filter function to manage getting excerpts of different lengths in the home page. I spent an entire day trying and trying… without success. Can you post a full working example? So many people are struggling with it I see… you mention the function but not how to implement it in the php code… what should i put instead of ? I tried various solutions I could find around and here, but they all get this output: Fatal error: Call to a member function filter() on a non-object in ...index.php on line 46

• Andrea on October 30th, at 6:06 pm •

  ok the code got stripped out..dunoo how to include it… anyway i meant “what should i put instead of the classic “the_excerpt()” within php brackets

• Bas on October 30th, at 10:38 pm •

  I understand that quite a few people find the example provided in the README unclear.
  To be honest it was a quickly added feature to make calling the filter directly possible for advanced users.

  I will try to write an easier explanation and/or a more accessible way to use the filter in the next version. Keep an eye out for updates (either on the plugin page or in your WordPress plugin list).

  If you can’t wait, try asking someone you know, who is familiar with PHP. The plugin FAQ should provide enough information for an advanced PHP programmer to figure it out.

• Andrea on October 31st, at 12:01 pm •

  Thanks’ Bas
  Can’t wait for the next version then

• Remkus on October 31st, at 12:36 pm •

  Seems like a wonderful plugin… but what if the_excerpt was manually filled with an url and one would like to use that input as actuall html. I’ve tried to do that with the plugin but there’s no difference. I am using this code: <a href="" rel="bookmark"></a>

  Any thoughts?

  Alvast bedankt,
  Remkus

• Remkus on October 31st, at 12:37 pm •

  oh oh.. the code did not past very well.. it’s just your standard ahref php the excerpt and then calls for the php the excerpt again.. you get the picture I’m sure

• Bas on October 31st, at 4:37 pm •

  Remkus, I think I know what you mean, but I’ll repeat it just to be sure:

  You have a custom written excerpt that contains regular HTML (such as an anchor tag), but it’s displayed as plain text (ie. the <> characters are converted to &lt;&gt; characters). However, you don’t want that conversion to happen, you want it to be actual HTML. Right?

  This is actually outside the scope of my plugin. My plugin doesn’t touch custom excerpts (next version will allow you to bypass custom excerpts, though) and returns them just as they are. The problem described above occurs when the excerpt is stored into the database, that’s when those characters are converted.

  I know of a plugin that allows advanced editing in the custom excerpt field (using TinyMCE, that is). I suppose this will also make sure the markup is preserved. You could give that a try (haven’t used it myself).

• Remkus on October 31st, at 9:53 pm •

  Thanks for taking the time to look at my question. I shall look into what the plugin does exactly you refer to.

  Dank je wel!

• Jon on November 14th, at 2:56 am •

  Excellent tool, just what I needed. One question though, is it possible to change the … at the end of the excerpt to a link to the post? I get the impression at times that my readers do not realise that there is more, especially if they find a cat/tag page via the search engines.

• Louis on November 23rd, at 6:57 am •

  Thank you for this plugin. It was exactly what I needed to make the excerpts on my site look cleaner, since they all have bolded text separated into a separate paragraph at the start. And I’m running the plugin on WP 2.6.3, and it seems to work fine.

• hpguru on November 25th, at 11:16 pm •

  Jon:
  Try this:

  
<a href="">Read end

• hpguru on November 25th, at 11:22 pm •

  Sorry, image but this code don’t work here.

  http://img98.imageshack.us/my.php?image=nimetnch3.png

  Where Lue loppuun is Read end, Jatka lukemista is Read end

  Sorry bad English.

• nargalzius on November 26th, at 8:05 pm •

  Awesome plugin, but I think there’s a bug: It’s still parsing the tag… check it out here:

  http://www.nargalzius.com/blog2

  compare the excerpts at the bottom from the excerpts from this page:

  http://www.nargalzius.com/blog

• nargalzius on November 26th, at 8:05 pm •

  Sorry, i meant it was still parsing the tag

• nargalzius on November 26th, at 8:06 pm •

  Arg, the P tag (or <p>… let’s see if this works)

• slobjones on November 27th, at 4:55 am •

  I’d love to use Advanced Excerpts, but I see two problems:

  1. The plugin inserts the blog’s title, as a link, at the top of the entry, whereas WP’s get_archives tag does not. How do I get that extra title out of there?

  2. The plugin seems to have a problem handling html links. I’m finding entire paragraphs turned into links. How do I disable linking?

  I’m using v2.6.2

  Thanks.

• nargalzius on November 28th, at 11:30 pm •

  I cheated on the p bug and just made the CSS set to inline.

  Another question though, based on the plugin file, this seems to work ONLY on the loop? Would it be possible to re-jigger it to and add a function that can get the results via post ID?

  I’m trying to integrate it with Marsh’s post plugin library and right now I’m copying the whole parsing code to make it work, I’d like to make the options set on the admin available to it and i’m stumped.

• Alan Richardson on December 28th, at 3:13 pm •

  Nice plug in. Thanks

• Football Shirts on December 28th, at 3:15 pm •

  Excellent plug-in and I love your site design. Keep it up great work!!

• Tom on January 7th, at 3:34 pm •

  hey I was wondering if there was another option for the updated version to this plug-in for WP 2.7. Thank you.

• Shelly on January 7th, at 3:50 pm •

  Just wanted to let you know, I just tested this plugin on my localhost version of 2.7, and it’s working just fine.

• Bas on January 7th, at 5:45 pm •

  Thanks for checking Shelly!
  I updated to 2.7 myself recently and I have no problems with my own plugin so far. I didn’t update the compatibility indication on the WordPress plugin site yet, though.

  @ Tom – The plugin should work just fine on 2.7, but please report any problems you encounter.

• Betty on January 8th, at 8:20 am •

  Hi, I’ve tried your plugin. I think it’s very good. Perhaps the best excerpt plugin for wordpress so far. The only problem is that it doesn’t support Chinese, or any other multi-byte languages. I’ve made a little change so that it can support Chinese. If you would like it, I can provide it to you. Maybe we could even get a Chinese version, though there is not much to translate .

• Bas on January 8th, at 2:50 pm •

  Glad to hear you like the plugin, Betty.
  Due to my assumption that supporting specific encodings would be a real hassle in PHP, I have not yet touched on that issue. I hear PHP doesn’t make it easy, but then again, I hardly work with multi-byte encodings.

  As for your fix, I am very interested in that. The plugin has been receiving a lot of pingbacks from Asian websites, so it would be a great advantage if the plugin could actually work for them as well.

  The interface text of the plugin is currently English only, but, as you said, there isn’t much. Anyhow, since I like programming so much, I will try to include support for (user-contributed) translations of the plugin via gettext in the next version.

• Tom on January 11th, at 11:35 am •

  I love this plugin. One question, though. It doesn’t seem to work when called up in the sidebar. Is there any way around this?

• Bas on January 11th, at 1:08 pm •

  @Tom – The plugin works just like the default the_excerpt(), that is, it must be called inside The Loop.
  The usual way around this is by creating a second loop.

• Matthew on January 12th, at 5:09 pm •

  Any chances of adding functionality so we can exclude this from the excerpt??

  wp-caption-text – it is Wordpress’s newest addition to images in 2.7. It would be AWESOME if we could start using this and it not show in the sidebar or other crazy places.

  I will stay tuned.

• Bas on January 12th, at 8:21 pm •

  @Matthew – I do add functionality, yes. However, a new version of the plugin is just 1 or 2 days away from release, so I can’t schedule yet another feature so soon. I will keep all suggestions in mind, though, so I can add the most practical ones as soon as the opportunity arises.

  So just to verify we are on the same page. You want the plugin to be able to strip an image and its wp-caption-text from the post?

  Instant update: You can always make wp-caption-text disappear from your page using CSS. For example:
  .wp-caption-text { display: none; }
  This hides all captions, so if you want it to be done in the sidebar (and the sidebar has an ID sidebar), use the following:
  #sidebar .wp-caption-text { display: none; }
  I think you get the idea.

• Trude on February 3rd, at 2:47 am •

  Hi

  I’ve read all the comments above and I’m still confused about how to make the [...] at the end of excerpts into read more links.

  Can somebody explain the whole process please?

• DaveCurlee on February 4th, at 1:33 am •

  I’m trying to use your plugin to actually show an embedded video on the front page of our site. (beta.realcookn.tv), in the headline section.

  Is there a possibility that you can add the embed tag to the list of tags that we can toggle?

  I’m kind of new to theme editing and your plugin seems to be the best way I can see for doing this.

  thanks
  -dave

• Bird on February 8th, at 8:20 am •

  Hey Bas, what was Betty’s solution for multi-byte languages? Does it work? Thanks!

• Bas on February 8th, at 5:44 pm •

  @ Bird – By using mb_string functions instead of the normal string functions. The solution has been included in the current version, so it should work.
  Not all installations of PHP support this, though, so check the FAQ to see what the requirements are.

• Bird on February 9th, at 5:59 am •

  Hey Bas. I’m still having trouble with your plugin (garbled characters). Betty’s version works great – maybe you can point your international users over to her website for now… (she credits you on her page).

• Mylene on February 11th, at 11:48 am •

  Hello,

  The plugin is sometimes inserting some on some excerpts. Do you know why?

• RogueDeals on February 11th, at 5:36 pm •

  It is not removing the break code if there’s a closing slash (complaint with xhtml 1.0 transitional it works with but not when it has a slash.

  Please fix

  Also, I’d like you to add support to remove scripts. For example, I used to use Odigio (automated podcasts), but I couldn’t remove it from my excerpts (it automatically puts it there) so if you could add that option that would be great.

  -Eric

• RogueDeals on February 11th, at 5:37 pm •

  oh and since the comment box didn’t show my code even though I used the code tag, I’m talking about the BR tag.

• Ant on June 9th, at 5:09 pm •

  I am using the custom excerpt to display how I’d like. I have a video in my post as an object. So, in my string I added…”allow_tags=object” and still now video is being displayed.

• Clayton on June 24th, at 4:34 pm •

  hi there

  im using latest versions of advanced excerpt and viper. Using WP 2.7.1

  im getting a preview pic when i insert a Youtube video in a post, plus it display this code:

  swfobject.embedSWF(”http://www.youtube.com/v/NIIcZVLXNwc&rel=0&fs=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=0?, “vvq-979-youtube-1?, “400?, “280?, “9?, vvqexpressinstall, vvqflashvars, vvqparams, vvqattributes);

  can some1 pls help me

• Faisal Khan on June 26th, at 12:14 pm •

  Hi Bas,

  I have been using Advanced Excerpt with WP 2.7 … but as soon as I upgraded to WP 2.8, it stopped showing the tag … I don’t know why and how …

  If you visit the site (www.ewp.eu), then you will see that the post shown on the home page is not showing picture but actually it has a picture and can be seen when you click the post …

  I would be very thankful for your help.

  Faisal.

• Tomás García Ferrari on June 30th, at 6:58 pm •

  The function array_complement –called from the_advanced_excerpt()– doesn’t return a value. Therefore, if you use the_advanced_excerpt(‘exclude_tags=img,p’) those tags are not excluded. The solution seems to be to add this:

  return $c;

  to the function

• Ole Sturm on July 14th, at 1:33 pm •

  Hi,

  I’ve just implemented your plugin and am please to say that of the 4 plugins I’ve tried, this one comes closest to what I require. However, one thing I have been unable to resolve are line breaks – I need my excerpt to consist of 4 separate lines but no matter what I try (breaks and paragraphs), the content still shows up on one line. Is there a way around this?

  Many thanks.

• Jacob on August 29th, at 7:28 am •

  I love this plugin and it has always done everything I need until recently. I updated to WP version 2.8 and now I no longer have an excerpt option in my edit posts or page screens. The plugin is still working in that I can get to the settings and the excerpts I have previously entered do show up on my site still but I again, they are no in the edit screens so they cannot be accessed. Any help you can give is greatly appreciated! Thanks so much.

• Bas on September 2nd, at 2:16 am •

  @ Jacob – The plugin only changes the way excerpts are displayed. It is not programmed to change anything in the screens for writing and editing posts.

  I have had reports that the plugin works fine on 2.8 and I just upgraded to 2.8.4 myself. I can confirm that the excerpt field is still available.

  I’d suggest you try to isolate the problem to one or several plugins first (ie. disabling them all and enabling them one-by-one until you find the culprit). If no plugins seem to be the problem, it may very well be a specific bug in WordPress.

• Atomico on September 2nd, at 4:05 pm •

  hi, i am using this plugin from much time.. but it don’t support youtube video.. how can i fix to show youtube video too?

  ty

• Lucato on November 12th, at 8:36 pm •

  Hi folks, I’m sorry for my bumb doubt, but it says “Go to ‘Excerpt’ under the ‘Options’ tab and configure the plugin”. It isn’t showing in my WP backend. Where do I find it. You you guys give more details. I’ve activated the plug-in, but didn’t get to find it.

• Paul Myatt on November 16th, at 3:09 pm •

  The plugin is useful but needs an option to strip WordPress’s “shortcodes” e.g. strip out everything between the [caption] and [/captions].

• Niska on November 19th, at 1:29 pm •

  This plugin doesn’t seems to be working on feeds. Are you aware?

• Faisal Khan on November 27th, at 3:19 am •

  Hi Bas,

  I am having the same problem as Clayton was having on June 24th comment.

  It is.

  m using latest versions of advanced excerpt and viper. Using WP 2.7.1

  im getting a preview pic when i insert a Youtube video in a post, plus it display this code:

  swfobject.embedSWF(”http://www.youtube.com/v/NIIcZVLXNwc&rel=0&fs=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=0?, “vvq-979-youtube-1?, “400?, “280?, “9?, vvqexpressinstall, vvqflashvars, vvqparams, vvqattributes);

  Can you please help?

  Many Thanks.

• Hazel on January 21st, at 10:57 pm •

  Great Plugin, I got exactly what i was looking for. Thanks.

• Hazel on January 21st, at 10:58 pm •

  I have same problem as Faisal Khan please help me out.

• DAniel on February 8th, at 9:14 pm •

  I just downloaded this plugin on a recommendation from someone.

  I am having issues with Wordpress stripping the HTML tags from my excerpts, which I use to help format the look of the post.

  Unfortunately, I just have no idea how to code .php – I’ve learned a couple of things, but i cannot figure out how to actually tell the plugin to allow HTML tags in my excerpts.

  I read the FAQ and saw the example code, but the only thing I care about adding is keeping the HTML tags.

  I saw where it said the ‘allow_tags’ code would let me do that, and entering ‘_all’ would tell it all tags, but I’m not clear on the format. Can someone give me a bit of a push?

  Thanks in advance, and sorry if I come off as an idiot. When it comes to code, I am one

• Bas on February 8th, at 9:43 pm •

  You can choose allowed HTML tags in the plugin settings page (Settings -> Excerpt) also. The only requirement in your code is to use the_excerpt() instead of the_content() on pages where excerpts should appear.

  If you want more fine-grained control, you will have to use the_advanced_excerpt() with custom parameters, but this isn’t necessary for most people. The main reason to use it is to override the general plugin settings.

• Daniel on February 8th, at 9:52 pm •

  Aye. I found that in the Excerpt settings. I didn’t look hard enough the first time.

  What’s weird is the ones I use (“p” and “br”) are on the list, and I even checked “Don’t remove any markup.”

  Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to change anything.

  The excerpt still seems to be ignoring the line breaks. I’m kind of confused and wondering if theres something else I am missing.

  Any help would be appreciated. the page is http://www.reelfocus.org (and the first post on the page is the one I’m having problems with)

  Thanks in advance

• Igor on February 9th, at 8:27 pm •

  Hi Daniel,

  We have the same problem you can see it here – ???????? ?????? – very strange look.

  I checked your site, how did you fix the problem?

  Kind Regards,
  Igor

  Site is – Best Japanese Products

• Igor on February 9th, at 8:41 pm •

  Sorry, Bas, but where did you find Experts Setting for this plugin?

• Igor on February 9th, at 8:43 pm •

  Sorry, Bas, but where did you find Experts Setting for this plugin? And where is a plugin setting page?

• Malcolm McAtee on February 18th, at 8:54 pm •

  Howdy Bas, Any thoughts on why the “read more” link is not showing up in my excerpts. Everything else works perfectly! I have checked the read more checkbox in settings > excerpt.

  Thanks, Malcolm

• chris on February 24th, at 4:17 pm •

  Any idea why the image caption doesn’t show, but rather take the image away.

• Fred on June 1st, at 5:40 pm •

  I cannot figure out how to get it to disallow images from my excerpts. The only thing I want to allow in my excerpts are active links. I am keeping it disabled until I can solve this problem.

  Nobody on the wordpress support forums seems to have an answer.

  I went into my plugin editor, looking at advanced-excerpt/advanced-excerpt.php. I see there is a section for “allowed tags” but I cannot find “img” or “img src” anywhere. I need to block image tags from loading in my excerpts, else they will load in my scrolling window and cause problems.

• Bas on June 1st, at 6:42 pm •

  @ Fred: You should be able to do this from the plugin settings page. Go to Settings -> Excerpt and then untick the “Don’t remove any markup” checkbox, as well as all the checkboxes for tags that you don’t want (img is also in the list).

Reply Here

What's your name? (I must know)

And your e-mail address? (I must know, but I will keep it a secret)

Do you have a website, too?

You may use some markup in your comment, unless you're drunk.
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

I'm done writing