Post and Page Excerpt Widgets let you display excerpts from posts or pages in the sidebar. For some reason, page excerpts were taken out of WordPress somewhere along the way, so the widget requires the Page Excerpt plugin to handle those. If The Excerpt Reloaded is installed, the widget will use that function; otherwise it’ll do a normal excerpt.
Unlike any other widget I’ve seen, this one allows you to link the widget title. These widgets do support the usual WP ‘more’ links, but in some situations it makes more sense to link the heading than to append a link. Here, you can do either, neither, or both.
This plugin grew out of some of the custom work I did for Justine’s site. We both wanted the sidebar to contain more information than just links in some cases — upcoming events, for example — but there was no good way to do that without a lot of custom code. Then I found Milan Petrovic’s Multi Instance Widget demo and realized that I could merge my work with his and come up with something that would be useful beyond this project.
Thanks for linking to my Page Excerpt plugin – I am glad it is useful.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Pages every had excerpts in WordPress core since they were introduced back in v1.5 (I think).
I could have sworn both pages and posts supported them at one point, but my memory is Swiss cheese.
Thanks so much for the plugin! It’s been hugely helpful.
Fantastic! Exactly what I needed for a magazine-type layout! Thank you so much for sharing!
Glad you found it useful, Rachel! Great illustration work on your site.