Easy Custom Auto Excerpt Premium

Easy Custom Auto Excerpt Premium controls how posts appear as previews on home, front page, search, archive, and custom archive pages. Choose the excerpt cutoff and show locations, then adjust image presentation and read more behavior.

How excerpts are created

The add-on uses a WordPress Read More marker when a post has one. Otherwise, it uses the post’s written excerpt; if neither is available, it generates an excerpt automatically. Character mode cuts content at the configured excerpt size. Paragraph mode shows one or more opening paragraphs, with settings based on the first, second, or third paragraph.

Location options can target pages such as the blog, front page, search results, and archives. Advanced settings can narrow locations by post type or category. Other controls set text alignment, preserve written excerpts and pictures, enable excerpt output in RSS feeds, strip shortcodes, and remove empty HTML tags.

Image and read more controls

For content images, select to display all visible images, only the first image, or the post’s featured image. Premium settings adjust image placement, width, margin, and, when using a featured image, thumbnail size. You can also disable excerpts on individual posts.

Read more options include custom link text and display behavior: show the link when the content exceeds the excerpt, always show it, or always hide it. Premium includes 10 font choices, a custom font size, more than 40 button themes, and custom button HTML. To hide the link using its text setting, enter a hyphen. The [ecae_button] shortcode can add a button manually; shortcode stripping must be disabled for it to remain in the excerpt.

Compatibility and setup

The plugin works with themes that call the_content() or the_excerpt() on home, search, and archive pages. It does not support themes that use custom excerpt functions, including Total, OceanWP, Writee, and Customizr. Automatic excerpt cutting can disrupt some content components; for those posts, use a WordPress Read More marker or write a manual excerpt.

1. Install both the free plugin and its Premium version to use the Premium edition.
2. In WordPress Administration, open Excerpt > Settings.
3. Choose the excerpt method, size, display locations, alignment, image settings, and read more options.
4. Set any Premium image, button, or per-post controls, then save and review excerpts on the selected pages.

The plugin listing reports that the plugin has not been tested with the latest three major WordPress releases and may have compatibility issues with newer releases.