The place here module has a parameter to display only a specified number of characters of an article. So far this has been done with a simple substr-Call which ripped through word boundaries and HTML-Tags – so I removed the HTML with strip_tags.

Instead of re-inventing the wheel for a better trim function I ripped from a WordPress Plugin (credits are in the readme and the module code, but I guess I still should contact the author Michael Kelly). So you can now have HTML in excerpts. If you still want to strip HTML that’s now an extra setting. Plus there is an option “Add String” that will add a few character (best suited is the ellipse ‘ …’ ) to the trimmed string.

This is backwards compatible, simply overwrite the old module files if you have it already installed.