To make decent excerpts, I needed something that stripped out all tags first and then limited the remaining words, all in one fell swoop, so I combined those functions into one plugin. Rick Ellis originally wrote Word Limit, then Vik Rubenfeld modified that into Word Limit Plus. I took Vik’s modification and added some HTML stripping for your eexcerpting pleasure.

For some background on this plugin, you can review these threads:

Autogenerating an excerpt when a summary doesn’t exist
Definitive answer on Filter_HTML status, update or alternative, please?

Developed by Ryan Masuga, http://masugadesign.com

Based on: pi.word_limit_plus.php

Docs: MD Eexcerpt
EE Extension Info: http://expressionengine.com/docs/development/extensions.html

Also see the related forum thread at the EE Forums.

1.1.1 (Sep 7, 2009)

• Fixed some logic to help avoid “Undefined Offset” errors
• General cleanup

1.1.0 (Mar 6, 2009 – Apr 3, 2009)

• Renamed to “MD” Eexcerpt
• Fixed problem with strings that were the exact length as the “stop_after” parameter.
• Added trim() in a couple places to keep things tidy
• Internal cleanup
• Added a new optional “append” parameter for further control
• Updated example usage

1.0.0 (Jun 25, 2007)

• Initial release