Once you have the Timeline Express HTML Excerpts Add-on downloaded and installed from the WordPress.org repository (see: how to install html excerpts), you can start populating your announcements with custom excerpts.

Head into any of your existing Announcements, or create a new announcement. On the announcement edit page, just above the announcement content section you’ll see a new section enabled, “”.

Example:

You can populate this field with any sort of markup that you can add to a post or a page, including shortcodes from other plugins.

Once you’re content with the excerpt, you can publish the announcement. On the timeline, you’ll notice that your new custom excerpt is now being used in place of the standard excerpt – you should also see that any HTML markup is properly parsed and rendered back to the user.

Example:

It’s important to note, that any custom announcement excerpts that you set will not be displayed on the single announcement page when a user clicks on ‘Read More’. The text that gets displayed on the single announcement page will be the content that you enter into the content area of the announcement. If you want the content to mirror the new custom excerpt, just copy and paste the custom excerpt down into the content field.