Catalyst Excerpts Plus

Description

Catalyst Excerpts Plus builds on the Catalyst Excerpts widget with additional features. This is based on the Catalyst Excerpts Widget created by Eric Hamm that comes with the Catalyst Framework. Since this plugin supports features of the Catalyst Framework it requires the Catalyst framework in order to work properly. Learn more about Catalyst…

Major features include:

• Option to grab a random set of posts based on the other criteria you set previously. (i.e. If you want five post from a specific category, selecting “Random” would grab five random posts from the selected category.)
• Choose to not remove HTML from titles or excerpt content. This is now restricted to a limited set of HTML tags.
• Sort excerpts by hottest or coldest topic. (Posts with most/least comments.)
• Additional thumbnail position control to place thumbnail below excerpt content, above it, above the title or even as the excerpt content background image.
• Display latest tweets. Uses a cache file to avoid bumping up against Twitter’s hourly API call limits. (Ignores tweets starting with @)
• Works for some custom post types.
• Option to remove link from title and/or thumbnail.
• Disable read more link without having to delete the read more text.
• Disable excerpt content all together.

Screenshots

• 

Installation

Upload the Catalyst Excerpts Plus plugin to your blog (or click install), activate it, then look for the Catalyst Excerpts Plus widget in your widgets admin area. Place the widget in a widget area and choose the appropriate settings.

That’s it, you’re done!

FAQ

Got a question?

Go ahead and contact me and I’ll do my best to answer it.

Reviews

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

1.0

• Initial public release

1.1

• Changed thumbnail options for outside/inside to outside/inside-top/inside-bottom. This way you can control whether the thumbnail displays above the excerpt content or below it.

1.2

• Fixed issue causing hottest topics option to not show.
• Added option to display coldest topics.
• Added option to display latest tweets.
• Cleans up it’s single options setting when deleting the plugin.

1.2.1

• Fixed minor issue with widget name not showing.

1.2.2

• Fixed issue with readme.txt display.
• Minor code change for future update compatibility.

1.2.3

• Fixed minor issue affecting special uses of the plugin.

1.2.4

• Added option to remove link in the title.
• Added option to remove link in the thumbnail.
• Added option to turn off the Read More link, without having to delete the Read More text.
• Fixed an issue with the Allow HTML in Excerpts option that was causing HTML to be stripped when it shouldn’t have.

1.2.5

• Added option to display posts from custom post types. This currently only works with custom post types that use the same fields a standard post type would use. Considering ways to map fields for a future release if this becomes important.
• Additional options for thumbnail location, like below content or set as the background image for the excerpt.
• Fixed bug preventing twitter feed from caching.
• Fixed other small bugs and issues.
• Limited the allowed HTML tags for options that allow HTML

1.2.6

• Quick bug fix preventing titles from being removed when option selected.

1.2.6.1

• Minor fix to file error.

1.3

• Changes to widget options layout. Moved excerpt settings and custom class option to right column to improve the layout.
• Optimized PHP

1.3.1

• Added “none” option for content type.

1.3.2

• Fixed issue with tweet content display.
• Fixed issue with display of some characters while allowing html in title.

1.3.3

• Added option to allow excerpts to be displayed horizontally.