Steve Grunwell

<a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Excerpt" rel="nofollow ugc">WordPress post excerpts</a> can be a great way to hand-craft the summary of your content. Unfortunately, writing post excerpts isn’t as nice of an experience as what you find elsewhere in WordPress. Want to include links in your excerpts, or bold some text? Hopefully you know some HTML!
Advanced Post Excerpts is designed to change that, by giving your editors an easy, intuitive interface for writing great post excerpts.
For complete details and/or to contribute to ongoing development, please <a href="https://github.com/stevegrunwell/advanced-post-excerpt" rel="nofollow ugc">visit this project on GitHub</a>.

Advanced Post Excerpt

Replace the default Post Excerpt meta box with a superior editing experience.

Michael Davis

Catalyst Excerpts Plus builds on the Catalyst Excerpts widget with additional features. This is based on the Catalyst Excerpts Widget created by Eric Hamm that comes with the Catalyst Framework. Since this plugin supports features of the Catalyst Framework it requires the Catalyst framework in order to work properly. <a href="http://bit.ly/eptrUI" rel="nofollow ugc">Learn more about Catalyst…</a>
Major features include:
<ul>
<li>Option to grab a random set of posts based on the other criteria you set previously. (i.e. If you want five post from a specific category, selecting “Random” would grab five random posts from the selected category.)</li>
<li>Choose to not remove HTML from titles or excerpt content. This is now restricted to a limited set of HTML tags.</li>
<li>Sort excerpts by hottest or coldest topic. (Posts with most/least comments.)</li>
<li>Additional thumbnail position control to place thumbnail below excerpt content, above it, above the title or even as the excerpt content background image.</li>
<li>Display latest tweets. Uses a cache file to avoid bumping up against Twitter’s hourly API call limits. (Ignores tweets starting with @)</li>
<li>Works for some custom post types.</li>
<li>Option to remove link from title and/or thumbnail.</li>
<li>Disable read more link without having to delete the read more text.</li>
<li>Disable excerpt content all together.</li>
</ul>

Catalyst Excerpts Plus

Catalyst Excerpts Plus builds on the Catalyst Excerpts widget for users of the Catalyst framework.

Advanced Post Excerpt vs Catalyst Excerpts Plus