These functions and hooks let you customise the output of the_excerpt() template tag. Just copy and paste into the functions.php file in your theme. This works for both posts and pages.

Have you ever needed to build a website which fit into the “Posts and Page” paradigm of Wordpress 95%, but also needed one or two bits of extra content? I often need to build sites that have a quote/testimonial or banner image tied to individual pages & displayed in the template separately to "the_content()". This is fine in Wordpress as long as it remains a one-to-one relationship as it can easily be achieved with custom fields (and check out the More Fields plugin for handling this), but achieving a one-to-many or many-to-many relationship in Wordpress requires some more dramatic extension.

Over the weekend I updated my blog to Wordpress 2.8. It’s been a relatively smooth process complete screw-up (see my comment at the bottom) although I lost my archive and recent post widgets as I had hacked them to be multiple instance. As they are now multiple instance anyway (hurrah) I was able to remove the extra code and get everything back working properly.