Just shy of two years ago (almost to the day, even), I first released Easier Excerpts for WordPress. It was, and still is, one of those plugins that I built for myself and ultimately decided to release for others to use.
It’s small and serves a very small improvement to the excerpt field in the post editor, but it’s something that I still use every day.
But over time, WordPress changes and improves, one’s ability to write code and build their tools changes. And that’s a lot of what went into this particular version.
Easier Excerpts
The latest version of the plugin is available in the WordPress Plugin Repository and is compatible with WordPress 4.9.4.
You can install it via your WordPress dashboard by searching for “easier excerpts” or, if you already have it installed, it will prompt you to update it as per usual.
The Short of It
If you’re interested in the details of this plugin either because you just stumbled across this post or you’re interested in seeing what’s changed, note the following:
The excerpt field will automatically expand to fit your content or will contract if you have shorter content. There are no options – it “just works.”
Furthermore, it will work with any post – new or old – and no data will be affected if you opt to uninstall.
The Technical Details
For details on the changes that went into this release:
- Added Namespaces
- Introduced PSR2 Compatible Code
- Verifies compatibility with WordPress 4.9.4
- Cleaned up the README to be more user-friendly
- Cleaned up and minified the JavaScript
- Removed the old test suite
Two of the things that are worth noting above is that namespaces have been added as this will eventually be part of the Blogging Plugins suite of tools.
Further, I removed the old test suite as I, though I think it’s useful for others from which to learn, I’m changing the way in which I write my tests, so the way the previous test suite was written was no longer relevant.
This is something that I plan to cover in an upcoming post. But for now, try out the plugin especially if you’re a regular blogger.
