Excerpt Plugin (for EE3)

Strips tags of whatever is in the tag pair and trunciates the remaining text. It's a fork of the obscenely useful EE2 plugin by @thinkclay, but heavily modified for EE3.

This one also sanitizes tag input through EE's security->xss_clean() method and performs stricter validation on parameter values.

It should be noted that this has been superceded by the limit modifier, making the plugin unnecessary extra overhead for EE4 users.

Usage

Wrap anything you want to be processed between the tag pairs. This will strip out all tags automatically and do a limit on words after.

{exp:excerpt limit="50"}text you want processed{/exp:excerpt}

You can also wrap it around custom fields:

{exp:excerpt limit="50"}{EXAMPLE_FIELD}{/exp:excerpt}

Parameters

Use the following parameters to specify what the plugin should return.

indicator="string"

The indicator parameter can be used to append characters onto the end of the content, if it has been limited.

{exp:excerpt limit="1" indicator="..."}Hello World{/exp:excerpt}

Hello...

{exp:excerpt limit="2" indicator="..."}Hello World{/exp:excerpt}

Hello World

limit="number"

The limit parameter lets you specify how many words or characters to return. Defaults to 100 if left undefined.

{exp:excerpt limit="1"}Hello World{/exp:excerpt}

Hello

limit_type="words|chars"

The limit_type parameter lets you specify if you want to limit to words (words) or characters (chars).

When limiting to characters, the plugin returns whole words, so the actual number of characters might be slightly larger.

{exp:excerpt limit="2" limit_type="chars"}Hello World{/exp:excerpt}

Hello

Examples

Meta Descriptions

One thing this helps with is to spit out dynamically generated meta and Open Graph descriptions for your entries, with a manual override in the entry editor.

Create a basic text input field for your channel ({entry_description} in this example, make sure the formatting option is set to None) so you can manually define the description on an entry-by-entry basis if desired.

With {exp:excerpt} wrapped around whatever fieldtype contains your page content, you can make sure EE will generate descriptions automatically if the field is left empty for that entry:

{if entry_description !=''}
<meta name="description" content="{entry_description}">
<meta property="og:description" content="{entry_description}">
{if:else}
<meta name="description" content="{exp:excerpt limit='40' limit_type='words' indicator='...'}{EXAMPLE_BODY_FIELD}{/exp:excerpt}">
<meta property="og:description" content="{exp:excerpt limit='40' limit_type='words' indicator='...'}{EXAMPLE_BODY_FIELD}{/exp:excerpt}">
{/if}

Changelog

2.1

9/1/2018

Overall partial rewrite to ensure compatibility for EE 4.3.4 and PHP 7.2.
Plugin code simplified to a single function. clean($str) no longer a separate function.
Tag data and parameters now run through EE's security->xss_clean() method.
limit parameter now validated by ctype_digit instead of is_numeric
limit now defaults to 100 instead of 500.
Stricter validation of limit_type parameter.
Errors now logged to developer log.

2.0

6/26/2018

Initial release of fork.