theMikeD

An excerpt is a (usually) brief, text-only post summary. It is used in various places of a theme when a summary of a post is needed, such as on your blog page and archive pages for terms.
Excerpts are either manually crafted or (usually poorly) automatically extracted from the main post content. Hand crafted ones are better because
<ul>
<li>they avoid things like sentences being cut off in the mid…</li>
<li>they allow you create an actual summary and not just the first x words from the post content</li>
<li>they allow you to do better SEO targeting</li>
<li>they look better</li>
</ul>
This plugin will enforce the use of hand-crafted excerpts by your users by preventing a post without an excerpt from being published.
Classic editor support is based on the work done by Scott Walkinshaw and other contributors, found <a href="https://gist.github.com/swalkinshaw/2695510" rel="nofollow ugc">here</a>.
<h3>Upgrading from a previous version</h3>
Use the upgrade link in the Dashboard (Dashboard > Updates) to upgrade this plugin.
<h3>License and Disclaimer</h3>
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License 2 as published by 
the Free Software Foundation.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
The license for this software can be found here: <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html" rel="nofollow ugc">http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html</a>

Mandatory Excerpts for WordPress

Causes the excerpt to be required before a post can be published. Supports both editor types (classic and block aka gutenberg).

tepelstreel

The RSS Image Feed doesn’t create a feed of images, but ataches the first image of the post to your feeds. Normally only the content has images showing. With our plugin there will be a clickable image even in the excerpt and in the content there will be only one image instead of all the images of the post. Since version 2.2 it works as a multisite plugin as well.
The plugin was tested up to WP 4.5 It should work with versions down to 2.7 but was never tested on those.

RSS Image Feed

The RSS Image Feed adds the first image of a post to your feeds, even in firefox and even if you only display the excerpt.

Mandatory Excerpts for WordPress vs RSS Image Feed