JeromeR

Thank you very much for taking time to reply.

I think I see.

What you’re saying is that some excerpts of my posts, within those first 20 words, had an opening html tag without a corresponding closing tag, which the browser attempts to render anyway. The result was that some excerpts were missing their bullet and title.

I just noticed some of my lists had excerpt_strip= set to yes and some set to no. I was experimenting with this setting because I wanted to remove images from the list, and also keep the spacing between list elements. I hadn’t noticed the yes/no inconsistency between my lists.

As recommended in your above reply, I read the section on More elements. That is too complex for me, so I’ll have try something else.

I will add to the workaround: no formatting in the first 20 words of the post, and set excerpt_strip=no in every list.

I’m choosing no because if it’s yes then the list items lose all spacing and becomes a wall of text. I cannot compensate for this with CSS because 1) as far as I can see, the Twenty Twenty-Five theme I use limits the custom CSS I can add, and 2) for me, custom CSS tends to be a complex, un-fun game of trial and error.

I shall update my site’s internal documentation to say:

• first paragraph of each post must have at least 20 words.
• the first 20 words cannot contain any text formatting, such as bold.

I hope that’s enough to avoid the issue.

Meanwhile

A note to the developer: some people—including me—who want to use your useful plugin are out of their depth.

Would you consider building a function that checks the shortcode for known potential conflicts and then warns the user?

• This reply was modified 8 months, 3 weeks ago by JeromeR. Reason: Typo

I found the answer in a YouTube video:

• There must be some Published pages and Posts (not all Private).

Here is the video:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYWH1Vydvg8