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.

Douglas "BearlyDoug" Hazard

Recent Posts Ultimate
This plugin takes the best features of five VERY popular recent posts plugins, tosses in the ability to show posts with or without HTML code and gives you a Shortcode builder (which you can copy/paste anywhere on a page, a post or inside a widget), while allowing custom post types to be used.
You can limit it to certain post types, certain categories, sort it by title or date posted, ascending, descending. You can even select whether you want the featured image shown (as a thumbnail), hide/show the title, link the title, the text, control how many words you want shown in the snippet, etc.
Important note: Not all features mentioned above are in this current version. See below for our planned updates.
While this is the first version of this plugin, it should be robust enough to handle just about any of your needs.
Current Version 1.0.7
<h4>Features:</h4>
<ul>
<li>Shortcode builder allows you to customize most aspects of the post (hide post title, category, date).</li>
<li>Works anywhere you can use shortcode.</li>
<li>Responsive, width-wise. Height of div will adjust automatically.</li>
</ul>
This plugin is not compatible with WordPress versions less than 5.0. Requires PHP 5.6+.
<h4>TROUBLESHOOTING:</h4>
<ul>
<li>Check the FAQs/Help located on WordPress’ Plugin page, or the Support forum on WordPress.org’s plugin area.</li>
<li>The Shortcode Builder has been extensively tested with both jQuery version 1.12.4 and 3.5.1, without any issues. The output, however, does not need jQuery/JavaScript.</li>
</ul>

Advanced Post Excerpt vs Recent Posts Ultimate