WP-Footnotes 3.2: Release Notes at sw’as

WP-Footnotes 3.2: Release Notes

This week saw the long awaited release of an update to the WP-Footnotes plugin for WordPress. WP-Footnotes is to easily add footnotes or sidenotes or a bibliograpy, etc. to any post using a simple mark-up which degrades (kind of) gracefully in the event that for some horrifying reason this plugin no longer works.

These notes actually cover releases 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2 which all happened in quick succession.

What’s been fixed

Some invalid mark up was being generated. Hopefully not anymore.
The notorious ‘a’ bug (I really hope).

What’s been improved

Add two new styles of footnotes:
- Repeated symbol, and
- Leading zero decimal.
Reorganisation to encapsulate fully in a class.
Security. I’ve hopefully addressed all know security issues for the plugin^[1].

One further improvement is that you are now able to change the footnote style on an individual post basis by adding a custom field^[2] to your post. If you add a field with the key ‘footnote_style’ and one of the following as the value:

decimal
decimal-leading-zero
lower-alpha
upper-alpha
lower-roman
upper-roman
symbol

What’s been changed

I removed the ’smooth scroll’ feature. If you want smooth scroll I suggest you add it to your theme. Instructions for doing so using jQuery (which is built into WP) are here.

There were a few XSS vulnerability allegations floating around, which were founded if your host is stupid enough to have register globals turned on. [↩]
Custom fields can be added on the write post screen down the bottom under ‘Advanced Options’. [↩]

Written by Simon

July 10th, 2008 at 8:28 pm

Posted in Geek, web development

Tagged with bibliography, footnote, footnotes, plugin, sidenotes, wordpress, wp-footnotes

11 Responses to 'WP-Footnotes 3.2: Release Notes'

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For anyone else who found that upgrading to v3.2 didn’t get rid of the “aa” problem, you might want to try updating the plugin’s options. For me, opening the Footnotes settings page and then clicking “update” was enough to fix everything.

Thanks for a super useful plugin!

whatknows

12 Jul 08 at 8:21 pm
O agree with the above comment. Opening the Footnotes settings page and then clicking “update” repaired the “aa” problem.

Bull

15 Jul 08 at 9:47 am
The footnotes plug in is nice and didn’t require to much template changing to work.

Richard

23 Jul 08 at 11:36 am
Is there any way to add smooth scrolling again as an option? I’m not going to lie — I’m completely lost on that jQuery page.

MK

3 Sep 08 at 5:37 am
Hi MK,

I don’t plan on putting that functionality back into WP-Footnotes. I know some users will lament its loss, but it shouldn’t really have been added in the first place. Smooth scroll doesn’t belong in a simple footnotes plugin. I appreciate that adding it yourself might be a little much of an ask for non-technical users.

Subscribe to my feed or check back to this site in a little bit; I’ll endeavour to write a post outlining the simple steps you need to take to add smooth scroll functionality to your site’s theme.

Simon

3 Sep 08 at 3:58 pm
Will do. Thanks for the reply. Great plugin, btw.

MK

3 Sep 08 at 8:02 pm
Hey Simon,

I’m having a little problem with the plugin. It doesn’t seem to like my theme and will show footnotes on the front page even when I tell it not to. Works fine with my other blogs but this theme seems to give it trouble. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

MK

19 Sep 08 at 3:35 am
Hi MK, Sorry I haven’t yet responded to your comment. I’d assume you’ve either sorted it out or given up by now, but if not, I can’t really help until you provide some more details. At the very least I’d need to know what theme you’re using.

Simon

6 Oct 08 at 11:22 am