Hi, TIm.
Keep in mind that Mingle just styles things, it doesn’t provide any functionality at all. Excerpts are handled by WordPress. The theme gives you an interface to this WordPress functionality via the [blog] and [portfolio] shortcodes, but the functionality itself is 100% WordPress.
With generated excerpts WordPress always strips HTML from the excerpt before displaying it. There is no way to prevent it from doing this other than by customising the WordPress core code that generates excerpts. If you want to have links or any HTML (or shortcodes) in an excerpt then you need to enter a manual excerpt in the Excerpt metabox. If you can’t see the Excerpt metabox then click Screen Options (top right) and enable the Excerpt option. WordPress leaves manual excerpts completely untouched.
With regards to your standfirsts, again you would need to customise the WordPress core code that generates excerpts to achieve this, or you would need to customise the Mingle [blog] shortcode to pull in your custom field data instead of or as well as the post excerpt. Please rememeber that the support team is not able to help you customise the theme. You will find the code for the [blog] shortcode in the framework/theme-functions/shortcodes.php file and the framework/theme-functions/layout-and-design.php file, and the code that outputs the blog itself is in the template-blog.php file.
Always keep in mind that if you modify the core Mingle files then when you update the Mingle theme your modified files may be overwritten and your modifications lost.
