Get Better Excerpt

** this plugin is no longer being update. Please feel free to adopt me! **

The Get Better Excerpt plugin works almost identical to the built in get_the_excerpt() and the_excerpt() functions except it returns whole words instead of cutting off the excerpt as the existing function does.

This plugin is maintained by Christopher Ross, http://thisismyurl.com or you can find him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thisismyurl/

Updates

Updates to the plugin will be posted here, to thisismyurl.com

Donations

If you would like to donate to help support future development of this tool, please visit thisismyurl.com

To install the plugin, please upload the folder to your plugins folder and active the plugin.

How do I display the results?

Insert the following code into your WordPress theme files:

General results

Without passing any parameters, the plugin will return ten results or fewer depending on how many posts you have.

thisismyurl_get_better_excerpt();

Altering the before and after values

By default the plugin wraps your code in list item (<li>) tags but you can specify how to format the results using the following code:

thisismyurl_get_better_excerpt(‘before=<p>&after=</p>’);

Adding a Link

If you’d like to link to the post (remember it’s not live yet) you can do so by calling:

thisismyurl_get_better_excerpt(‘link=true’);

How many words?

You can specify the number of words returned using the option:

thisismyurl_get_better_excerpt(‘words=20’);

Skip the excerpt?

If you would like to load the content directly, skipping the entered excerpt:

thisismyurl_get_better_excerpt(‘skipexcerpt=true’);

Include a trailing character?

By default the plugin includes a … after the excerpt, you can remove it or change it by altering:

thisismyurl_get_better_excerpt(‘trail= …’);

Return a whole sentence

If you would like to return whole sentences rather than words, you can control the number of sentences to return:

thisismyurl_get_better_excerpt(‘sentence=1’);

Echo vs. Return

Finally, if you’d like to copy the results into a variable you can return the results as follows:

thisismyurl_get_better_excerpt(‘show=false’);

2.0.0

• uses wp_trim_words()

1.5.0

• Tested for WordPress 3.2
• Optimized code

1.0.2

• removed update functions

1.0.0 –
Official Release
Added Sentence options