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 (everything belonging to HTML tags is not counted)
5. Possibility to ignore custom excerpts and use the generated one instead
6. Theme developers can use the_advanced_excerpt() for even more control (see the FAQ)

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

Version 0.2.1 adds support for multibyte characters (eg. Chinese and Japanese). This is slightly experimental, more details in the FAQ. Plugin translations are fully supported and language files are included for translation. The FAQ provides more info on this, also.