With Advanced Excerpt Plugin you can easily display your WordPress posts as excerpts without trimming away the necessary HTML tags.

It is a core-essential to customize your blog and make it look clean and properly structured. First of all, what is a post excerpt? It is a preview of the actual post where it displays only few texts from the actual post. Post excerpt is something preferred by most bloggers since it has many advantages attached. Readers can navigate through the home page of the concerned blog and select the topic of interest easily when the list of posts are in excerpt format. It also adds to the appearance of the blog.

Excerpting the posts can be painful if you do not have a right setup to work with. Many plugins perform their job perfectly but strip away the necessary HTML tags included in the formatting of the posts. With Advanced Excerpt Plugin you can easily and fully customize the excerpts and control how your posts will look like when in excerpt mode.

This is how a post looks like with basic excerpting. In this case all the tags have been stripped off making the excerpt look hide us:

The same post with using Advanced Excerpt Plugin:

How to use the Advanced Excerpt Plugin:

• After downloading and installing it, navigate to Admin panel > Settings > Excerpt
• customize the way you want or must keep with the default settings intact. (Keeping the default settings will include all the html tags in the excerpted post)
• That is all you need to do.

Configuration options offered:

Advanced Excerpt Plugin is developed by Bas, a Computer Science student.

Download the plugin from: WordPress plugin directory

6 essential steps to be followed for manually upgrading to WordPress 3.0 or any other version, the error free way

WordPress 3.0 a.k.a ‘Thelonious’ was released yesterday with a huge bag of improvements like Custom post types, MU merge, menu editor, Twenty Ten theme, over 1200 bug fixes making it more stable, secure and faster than ever before. But, my upgrade attempt wasn’t quite smooth.

On an average, every 4 out o f 10 WordPress upgrades are not successful in the first attempt. This is not a official stats but is in accordance with what is observed on WordPress related forums. I ran into a problem while upgrading to 3.0 where my Admin Panel was not accessible at all and it barfed up a 404 error. My first thought was to re-install WordPress (I never followed the etiquette of disabling all plugins before the upgrade process), but I decided to play wiser this time. I disabled only those plugins that were active in frequent communication with the database like WP Super Cache, WP Database backup and some security plugins to save my efforts. Deleting cached pages from wp super cache did not help. Surprisingly, WP Security Scan plugin was causing all the mayhem!

In simple words, always follow these essential steps before any manual WordPress upgrade/re-install:

• Put your blog in maintenance mode with a easy to use Maintenance Mode plugin. Follow BloggingWithSuccess’s steps on how to install and use this plugin. Though this is optional, i recommend using it as it communicates with the readers clearly about what is going on
• Like i said earlier, disable only those plugins that are active in frequent communication with the database like WP Super Cache, WP Database backup and security plugins. If you do not understand what this means, you should disable all plugins before the upgrade to be on a safer side
• Login to your blog’s ftp server with your preferred FTP program
• Overwrite all extracted files from the zipped WordPress file except for WP Content folder (It contains your blog’s themes and plugins which you don’t want to lose) and wp-config.php file
• After the files have been overwritten, append /wp-admin/upgrade.php to your blog’s home url in the address bar and hit the enter key. This is to perform the final step in the WordPress upgrade process. So, you should be directed to the upgrade page which will look like this:

Update: I have noticed that on this version of WordPress, the links in admin panel are breaking down when a “certain number” of plugins are activated. If is the case for you then you should deactivate the unnecessary plugins and active only the important ones until a patch is available.

So, how has your WordPress installation experience been ever since you started using it?