Timeline Express Pro Modifications

Timeline Express Pro is a WordPress Plugin that presents information in a timeline format. They refer to the individual timeline items as "announcements", which are similar to post or pages. By default, instead of displaying the full content of the "announcement" it displays an automatically generated "excerpt" (abbreviated version). By default this excerpt does not contain any HTML or ShortCode (only plain text). For people that do wish to display HTML in the "excerpts" they created an Add-On (Timeline Express HTML Excerpt Add On) that displays a custom "excerpt" of the timeline post which can include HTML content and ShortCode. Unfortunately this is a manual process. IE, the "excerpt" must be created and maintained separately from the main announcement.

That's the way it functions, and I used the features as they were to do something slightly different than what they had envisioned for their software. I used the custom "excerpt" as the main content of my timeline. I did this because I realized I could make each "announcement" its own self-contained webpage. And it worked great. But it also left another feature unneeded. That feature was the ability to display the full announcement. That wasn't something I needed because I was already displaying the full "announcement" with the Excerpt Add-On.

But then I came up with a use for it. The website I was developing was a biography that required sources to be cited.

Everything was perfect until it came to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The SEO Plugin I was using only provided a sitemap for the full "announcement", not the content of the Excerpt Add-On. That meant only the reference sections were cataloged by search engines, not the content that was displayed to users. I thought I could work around it by having the SEO Plugin create sitemaps for each of the webpages the timelines were on. That didn't work either because the SEO software couldn't "see" the individual items on a timeline. So a page containing several dozen images resulted in a sitemap that had ZERO images. Crap!

There is however a flaw (in my opinion) with this . How to fix this?

I had an idea which involved burrowing into the PHP code for the Add-On and making a small change