Generating excerpts from a custom post type to display in a Widget

Question

I am trying to display the two most recent posts excerpts in a header widget. Some of the posts are going to be regular blog posts and others are of a custom post type which also utilises the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. The custom post has 4 fields one of which is the wysiwyg text area for the content - of which I need the excerpt to generate from.

I have registered the 'excerpt' as a support and on the custom post type it shows up empty ready for manual input, but I don't want my client to have to manually write an excerpt I want it to generate from the content as the normal posts seem to do just fine with any basic excerpt widget.

I have tried out many widgets that say they offer custom post type excerpt functionality including the ACF Recent Posts Widget which is supposed to do just what I want. I can't seem to find the solution on their support forum either.

The point is I seem to be missing someway to generate an excerpt from a custom post using a custom fields content - is there a way to do this?

I should note I'm relatively new to wordpress and php so sorry if this is obvious or poorly constructed. Happy to provide any of my code if it helps - just not sure what to copy here as it's more of a general question involving custom post types and ACF plugin.

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

SOLVED

Use this code in the function.php file

function custom_field_excerpt() {
global $post;
$text = get_field('description'); //Replace 'your_field_name'
if ( '' != $text ) {
    $text = strip_shortcodes( $text );
    $text = apply_filters('the_content', $text);
    $text = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $text);
    $excerpt_length = 20; // 20 words
    $excerpt_more = apply_filters('excerpt_more', ' ' . '[...]');
    $text = wp_trim_words( $text, $excerpt_length, $excerpt_more );
}
return apply_filters('the_excerpt', $text);
}

Then call the function in a custom WP_query using all post types in the header and call wp_reset_postdata(); when you're done instead of using a widget!