WordPress.org

Author: Bas van Doren

This plugin adds several improvements to WordPress' default way of creating excerpts.

1. It can keep HTML markup in the excerpt (and you get to choose which tags are included)
2. It trims the excerpt to a given length using either character count or word count
3. You can customise the excerpt length and the ellipsis character that will be used when trimming
4. The excerpt length is real (ie. "words" and characters belonging to HTML tags are not counted)

In addition to keeping HTML markup in the excerpt, the plugin also corrects HTML that might have been broken due to the trimming process.