List Posts – can't do it they way I want to

I’ve spent days trying plugin after plugin and they all do some but not all of what I want to do.

“Posts By Tag” is close. It allows me to list all posts that have been tagged with a particular tag. It allows me to put this list exactly where I want it in the page body with shortcode… or in a widget with shortcode. It also allows me to invoke it twice on the same page.. once for tag A and once for Tag B.

So far so good.

But it doesn’t do the following:

– It doesn’t do a good job with showing thumbnails. “YD Recent Posts” does it better… it looks for either the featured image or the image just in the post itself if any and displays an always-the-same-size thumbnail the way it should. If no image at all, it works properly too (unlike Posts By Tag) and doesn’t just put in img src=”” (blank) which causes a empty box to display looking like an error message.

– I need it to support various possible choices I might need to make as to whether to show the exceprt or the full text of the post (or nothing). This should controlled by a shortcode parameter. Also whether or not to strip out all of the formatting out of the text (they all do that… but what are you supposed to do if you want to show the full text of the post with formatting like it was meant to look like?).

All I can think of doing is trying to learn how to code php and re-write “posts by tag” so it does it the way I want. Is that my best option?

Example of what I’m doing: https://specspeed.tdothost.com/