MT Extensions: excerpt

Plugins : excerpt_words 2.0 Dec 31 2002 | # | C:10

excerpt_words 2.0

December 31, 2002 - updated February 8, 2006 (Download)

Global filter that creates an excerpt consisting of the first n words in the tag, followed by ” …” if the tag was truncated.
Specify a negative n to use the blog’s “words in excerpt” setting.
You can optionally specify a different continuation text (…) by appending it to the number of words like so: excerpt_words=”n|continuation”.

Example: Limit the number of words displayed in a comment entry to 10 words:

<$MTCommentBody excerpt_words="10"$>

Example: Limit the number of words displayed in a comment entry to 10 words and use ” [etc.]” as continuation text:

<$MTCommentBody excerpt_words="10| [etc.]"$>

Example: Limit the number of words displayed in a comment entry to the blog’s “words in excerpt” setting and don’t use any continuation text:

<$MTCommentBody excerpt_words="-1|"$>

Example: Display the six most recent comments with a short excerpt using the default continuation text ” …”:

<MTComments lastn="6" sort_order="descend">
<p>
    <b><a href="<$MTCommentEntryID pad="1"$>.htm"><$MTCommentAuthor$> said</a>:</b>
    <$MTCommentExcerpt excerpt_words="10"$>
</p>
</MTComments>

Version History

Version 2.0 December 15, 2003

Added support for specifying continuation text. Don’t display continuation text if the excerpt displays all words in the tag.

Version 1.0 December 31, 2002

Initial relase.

Comments | All

1) Posted by: Leon on November 7, 2003 7:18 AM

thanks! this was exactly what i needed!

2) Posted by: Patrick Madden on December 15, 2003 10:17 AM

Excellent plugin, one that MT should have standard, IMO. Is there any way to selectively turn off the ‘…’? Or make it so that if, say, a comment only has 7 words, and excerpt_words=”10”, you automatically get only the 7 words and no ‘…’?

3) Posted by: Mister X on December 19, 2003 8:53 AM

Cool blog!

4) Posted by: Steve on February 6, 2004 8:46 PM

I’m new to MT, and already your plugins have made a huge difference to me!

One thing that would be helpful to me with excerpt_words would be a max_word_length parm. If the max was set to 20, and excerpt_words ran into a 55-character URL, for example, it could break the URL into two 20- and one 15-character pieces:

http://www.nonplus.net/software/mt/excerpt_words.htm
would become 3 words:

http://www.nonplus.n et/software/mt/excer pt_words.htm

The reason this would be helpful is this: I put a list of comment excerpts in a CSS div that floats to the right, with width set to 25% of the larger body. It works great as long as no words are longer than the 25%. When IE runs into the first long word (or link), though, it allows the div to grow wider than the space allotted, and it floats down to the bottom of the page. (Mozilla does a little better.)

Thanks again for all your great work, Stepan!

5) Posted by: Creno on February 20, 2004 8:32 AM

Niccceee pagee

6) Posted by: Peter Costello on October 10, 2005 8:48 AM

Hi, I’m currently using firstNwords for this sort of thing. My problem is that this strips out any HTML I have in the entry. I need images and spans to still be read in. Does this plugin allow for that? Do you know of anything that might help?
Thanks

7) Posted by: stepan on October 11, 2005 3:10 PM

Nope, this plugin strips HTML tags, too. I’m not aware of a plugin that would do what you want it to. Truncating HTML while making sure that you end up with something that’s still valid markup is not a trivial thing to do.

8) Posted by: Peter Costello on October 17, 2005 6:29 AM

Hey Stepan,
Iened up finding the elipses plugin by Brandon Fuller . However, the page no longer validates. Needs a little more work on my part perhaps. Thanks for the help.
Cheers
Pete

9) Posted by: Pankaj on June 15, 2006 10:33 AM

Hi,
Do you any idea how can we print the comment count one, two three…. instead of 1,2,3,…

10) Posted by: Stepan on June 15, 2006 10:58 AM

The NumberSpell plugin converts numbers to their text representation.