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.

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.