Yes, the shortcodes being stripped from the excerpts was the problem. Thanks for posting the solution–this worked.

Just a quick note–when I tried to visit your linked article, I got the error
This site can’t be reached
www.gerkindevelopment.net refused to connect.

I was able to view a cached version from Google but I thought you would want to know.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by handwovenbox.

I thought I would revisit this thread one more time to post a different solution that may work better than the linked one. In testing my wordpress after following Gerkin’s linked article, I realized that for other types of content, no excerpt was being created at all.

I found the working solution halfway down this page: https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/42743/the-excerpt-and-shortcodes

The code is:

add_filter('the_excerpt', 'do_shortcode');
remove_filter('get_the_excerpt', 'wp_trim_excerpt', 10);
add_filter('get_the_excerpt', 'my_custom_wp_trim_excerpt', 99, 1);
function my_custom_wp_trim_excerpt($text) {
    if(''==$text) {
        $text= preg_replace('/\s/', ' ', wp_strip_all_tags(get_the_content('')));
        $text= explode(' ', $text, 56);
        array_pop($text);
        $text= implode(' ', $text);
    }
    return $text;
} 

I inserted this code into the theme’s functions.php file and now shortcodes are shown and executed everywhere they should be.