Easy Custom Auto Excerpt Premium controls how posts appear as previews on home, front page, search, archive, and custom archive pages. Choose where excerpts appear, and use advanced location settings to narrow them by post type or category.

Which excerpt should a post use?

The extension uses a post’s Read More marker when present. Without one, it uses the excerpt written for that post; if neither is available, it generates an excerpt automatically. You can also disable excerpts on individual posts.

Set the cutoff by character count or use the paragraph settings, which show one or more paragraphs from the start of the content and offer methods based on the first, second, or third paragraph. Other controls set text alignment, preserve written excerpts and pictures, and enable excerpt output in RSS feeds. You can choose to strip shortcodes or remove empty HTML tags. A special method setting may help address errors on some themes.

How should images appear?

Choose to show all images in the visible excerpt content, only its first picture, or the post’s featured image. Premium settings adjust image position, width, and margin when using the first content image or featured image. The thumbnail-size setting applies only when using the featured image.

What can you change about the read more button?

Set custom read more text and choose whether the button appears only when the content exceeds the excerpt size, always appears, or stays hidden. Premium adds 10 font choices, a custom font size, more than 40 button themes, and the option to personalize the button HTML. You can also set text before the button, align it, or make it inline with the paragraph.

To add a button manually in a post, use [ecae_button] and set shortcode stripping to No. To remove the read more link, enter a hyphen in the read more text field.

Will it work with the theme?

The extension works with themes that call the_content() or the_excerpt() on home, search, and archive pages. It does not support themes that use custom functions to display excerpts, including Total, OceanWP, Writee, and Customizr.

What to check before installing

The installation instructions require both the free plugin and the Premium plugin for Premium functions. After installing them, open Excerpt > Settings in WordPress Administration, choose the excerpt method, locations, image options, and read more settings, then save and review the selected pages.

The plugin listing says it has not been tested with the latest three major WordPress releases. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues with newer WordPress versions.