Did you try searching for this first? There is lots of information about doing this in the archives of this forum.
http://wordpress.org/search/random+post?forums=1
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/40818
I had not searched the forum, no, was just searching through the codex.
However none of these posts seem to help either. I’ve posted a comment on Skippy’s site, but considering how old his hack is, I don’t expect much help.
You mean as a “See another article in this category” list or link? CG-Samecat was built for that purpose. If you pass it the current post ID (or ‘current’ 😉 ), it will filter that post out of the result set.
The best/newest version of SameCat is in my CG-PowerPack set of plugins.
-d
Actually when I try to activate it, it gives me errors on my site, before I even put any of the information on the site.
I didn’t think trying to find a random post plugin would be this difficult.
I’ve tried manipulating Skippy’s hack, but have been unsuccessful.
Does anyone know if there has been a plugin developed yet to display a random post from a specific category? And if at all possible, only the excerpt?
That plugin does not allow you to specify a certain category to post from. It also states in the comments that the owner does not intend to modify it so it does. I implemented it, just to test it, and it doesn’t seem to display the excerpt correctly either for some reason. So I’m back to the drawing board 🙂