Top Posts Page

Hey folks. Looking for a little help on a project I am running.

As part of a customized child template that I am using, I have created a page template that lists top post. Here is the code.

$thispost = 1;
  $start = date('Y-m-d', (time() - (60 * 60 * 24 * $days)));
  $end = date('Y-m-d');

  $login = new GADWidgetData();
  $ga = new GALib(‘oauth’, NULL, $login->oauth_token, $login->oauth_secret, $login->account_id);

  // $login = new GADWidgetData(get_option('gad_auth_token'), get_option('gad_account_id'));
  // $ga = new GALib('client', $login->auth_token, '', '', $login->account_id);

  $pages = $ga->pages_for_date_period($start, $end);
  echo "<ol>";
  foreach($pages as $page) {
    $url = $page['value'];
    $title = $page['children']['value'];
    // $excerpt = get_the_excerpt_id($page->ID);
    // $excerpt = get_the_excerpt($page);
    // $excerpt = get_post_meta($page, 'key_1', true);
    // $excerpt = "this will be the excerpt";
    // ignore these page titles
    $ignore = array(
      '(not set)',
      'engineering-matters',
      'engineering-matters.com',
      'engineering-matters.com - Part 2',
      'engineering-matters | Engineering Executives',
      'About the Blog | engineering-matters.com',
      'About the Blog |',
      'About Lifecycle Insights | engineering-matters.com',
      'engineering-matters | The blog about the issues that matter to engineering',
      'About Chad Jackson | engineering-matters.com'
    );
    if(!in_array($title, $ignore)){
      // list any strings you would like to remove from the titles
      $remove = array(
        " | engineering-matters.com",
        " |",
        "engineering-matters.com",
        " ? Company Name"
      );
      $newtitle = str_replace($remove, "", $title);
      echo '<strong><li><a href="' . $url . '" rel="nofollow">' . $newtitle . '</a></li></strong>';
     // echo get_the_excerpt($page);
      $thispost++;
    }
    if($thispost > $showposts) break;
  }
  echo "</ol>";

?>

I have it running successfully. You can see the result here.

https://www.engineering-matters.com/top-posts-all-time/

I would like to also list the excerpt of each post in the list after the title. I have tried using the get_the_excerpt function within the foreach loop, but it returns an array (and shows that on the page when I echo it). Here is the citation to that function.

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/get_the_excerpt

Any help would be greatly appreciated.