Steve Grunwell

Open-source contributor, speaker, and electronics tinkerer

Enhance your Editorial Experience with Advanced Post Excerpt

Another little side project I wanted to keep everyone abreast of: Advanced Post Excerpt is now available on WordPress.org.

It’s a simple plugin, certainly, but Advanced Post Excerpt replaces the standard WordPress “Post Excerpt” meta box (a plain textarea) with a stripped down TinyMCE editor instance. Finally, there’s no need for your authors to write HTML (or copy it out of the “Text” tab of the main editor); instead, they’re given the essentials for WYSIWYG text editing (bold, italic, link, etc.) and nothing more.

The "Post Excerpt" meta box on the WordPress edit screen with Advanced Post Excerpt active.

It’s also completely backwards-compatible with existing post excerpts, and should the plugin ever become disabled the post excerpt meta box will go back to just displaying a textarea that accepts HTML.

Configurable and Open-source

Like with all of my plugins, I want to make sure Advanced Post Excerpt will work out of the box with reasonable defaults, but I also recognize that not all sites are built the same. With that in mind, there are a few configuration options available via the WordPress plugins API, including limiting Advanced Post Excerpt to specific post types and/or adjusting the TinyMCE settings.

Advanced Post Excerpt is also open-sourced under the MIT License and available on GitHub, so please feel free to modify and contribute changes you’d like to see.

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