WP-Footnotes (a plugin for WordPress) at sw’as

WP-Footnotes (a plugin for WordPress)

Trying to figure out how to use the WordPress Footnotes plugin? You’ve come to the right place. If you’ve got feedback send it in »

Feature requests and bug reports should be recorded on my bug tracking site.

Installation

Upload the footnotes folder and all it’s contents to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
You’re good to go!

Usage

Creating a footnote is dead simple, just include it with double parentheses ((Your very own footnote!)), like that. With the WP-Footnotes plugin enabled the previous sentence will end up looking like this:

Creating a footnote is dead simple, just include it with double parentheses^[1], like that.

Important note: Make sure you include a space before your opening double parentheses! or the footnote won’t work^[2].

Old School

Back in the day when the very first version of WP-Footnotes was released the mark-up used was a little different. If you’re one of those people who was around back then, rest assured that an upgrade won’t make your posts using the old mark-up look totally stupid. In fact they will look exactly as they’re supposed to, footnotes and all^[3].

Options

You have a fair few options to do with how the identifier links^[4], footnotes and back-links look which can be found in the WordPress admin area under Options » Footnotes. Most of the options are fairly self explanatory.

Other Features

Paginated Posts

Some of you seem to like paginating post, which at this point is kind of problematic. By default each page of your post will have it’s own set of footnotes at the bottom and the numbering will start again from 1 for each page.

At this point the only way to get around that^[5] is to know how many posts are on each page and tell WP-Footnotes what number you want the list to start at for each of the pages. So at some point on each page^[6] you need to add a tag to let WP-Footnotes know what number the footnotes on this page should start at. The tag should look like this  where “5″ is the number you want the footnotes for this page to start at.

Referencing

Sometimes it’s useful to be able to refer to a previous footnote a second (or third, or fourth…) time. To do this, you can either simply insert the exact same text^[7] as you did the first time^[7] and identifier should simply reference the previous note. Alternatively, if you don’t want to do all that typing again, you can construct a footnote like this: ((ref:1)). and the identifier will reference the footnote with the given number^[8].

Download

Download it from the official WordPress Plugin Repository.

Feedback and other stuff

WP-Footnotes (v1.0.x) has been tested in a fairly limited set of use-cases^[9]. It has not been specifically tested for compatibility with any other WordPress Plugins^[10]. I absolutely welcome bug reports, feature requests and other feedback and intend to roll bug fixes into new releases fairly rapidly^[11].

WP-Footnotes is free software licensed under the GNU-GPL. You are welcome to redistribute WP-Footnotes under certain conditions. WP-Footnotes comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.

Your very own footnote! [↩]
This was a deliberate decision made when writing the second version of footnotes (v0.9) so that if WP-Footnotes was to stop working for some unholy reason, it wouldn’t end up looking((really silly)), but only ((kind of silly)). [↩]
Yes, that means you can, if you like, continue using the old mark-up <footnote>like this</footnote>. [↩]
That’s the little number bit. [↩]
This problem could be solved much more elegantly if WordPress provided one or two more filter hooks for manipulating the post content at different points in the stack. [↩]
That is, between each  tag. [↩]
Like this. [↩] [↩]
Even though it’s a little more typing, using the exact text method is much more robust. The number referencing will not work across multiple pages in a paged post (but will work within the page). Also, if you use the number referencing system you risk them identifying the incorrect footnote if you go back and insert a new footnote and forget to change the referenced number. [↩]
Specifically, only WordPress 2.1.1 and 2.1.2. [↩]
Although I haven’t yet had any problems on this website with these plugins. [↩]
Much more rapidly than in the past. [↩]

Written by Simon

March 26th, 2007 at 4:11 pm

Posted in General

Tagged with bibliography, footnote, footnotes, mark-up, plugin, plugins, reference, Simon Elvery, wp-footnotes

238 Responses to 'WP-Footnotes (a plugin for WordPress)'

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How do you activate the smooth scroll feature?

Christiaan

9 Nov 08 at 2:32 pm
Hi Christian. The latest release of the plugin doesn’t include the smooth scroll feature, sorry.

Simon

9 Nov 08 at 7:58 pm
Hey, does this work for WP2.7? I wish I had discovered this plugin earlier!

Julie

13 Dec 08 at 7:39 pm
Thanks so much for a great plug-in! I just installed it and it seems to work fine - very useful.

– David

david

2 Jan 09 at 5:22 pm
Hi there, this is an absolutely great plugin！It looks so simple yet elegant. Thanks for your effort.

Khoo

5 Jan 09 at 6:57 am
Just installed it and it works fine. The idea with the double parentheses doesn’t conflict with any other plugins. Well done!

Fink About It

7 Jan 09 at 3:39 pm
Brilliant plugin, exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

Andrew Jones

12 Jan 09 at 7:02 pm
I am experiencing a bug.
In Wordpress plugin section, I have this message:

<

blockquote>Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /membri/deviantdark/wp-content/plugins/wp-footnotes/footnotes.php on line 259

This happens with version 3.2 and 3.3.
How should i fix it?
Thanks

deviantdark

20 Jan 09 at 10:31 am
So does this work with 2.7?

Berin Szoka

25 Jan 09 at 10:03 pm
This is AWESOME! I just got it to work after reading this page for the first time. It’s beaaaaaaaaautiful. Thanks for creating this! I’m so happy…

Brandon

23 Feb 09 at 5:17 pm
Oh, by the way, this is my first post with the plugin showing how great it is!!!

Brandon

23 Feb 09 at 7:33 pm
I doubt I’m the only one to have encountered this because the problem is reproducible every time. Assume you have some content in a WP editor window and you want to use it in another post. You’d create a new post and paste the content in there and publish, wouldn’t you? Well, by doing this, the underlying space characters are lost, footnotes can’t find them and no footnotes appear. Instead your content contains all the text in your footnotes in double parentheses ((like so)). How ugly! Anyway, after some playing around, I’ve found a workaround which isn’t ideal but will serve for now. I’m not sure if you need the Tiny MCE Advanced plugin or whether it’s part of the WP distribution but look for a button entitled ‘Paste as plain text’. Use that to paste any content where you want to keep your footnotes and they should appear correctly when you next publish. Needless to say, it’s not perfect, and if you’ve used any text formatting in your post, that needs to be re-applied. If it’s quicker to retype the footnotes, do that. If it’s quicker to re-apply the formatting do that, but it seems you can’t have your cake and eat it. (That’d just be silly wouldn’t it?).

Cheerio.

Pete.

Pete

6 Mar 09 at 5:06 pm
Hi Pete,

Thanks for the comment. Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do about that from a plugin perspective. It’s just TinyMCE/WordPress behaving badly. Sorry.

Simon

7 Mar 09 at 3:37 am
It appears that WP-Footnotes does not support nesting of footnotes. For example:

I want to reference this ((this first footnote also needs a footnote ((because sometimes things get complicated)) ))

Andrew Ferguson

19 Mar 09 at 8:52 am
It appears that WP-Footnotes does not support nesting of footnotes. For example:

I want to reference this ((this first footnote also needs a footnote ((because sometimes things get complicated)) ))

Do you think you’ll support this in a future version?

Also, referencing does not appear to work (See: http://andrewferguson.net/2008/12/31/year-end-zeitgeist/)

Andrew Ferguson

19 Mar 09 at 8:54 am
Hello ! It’s a very good plugin…! But I have a difficulty : I want to insert a shortcode before notes (in “before” options). Options accept HTML code, but not shortcode or php. It will be possible ? One a big thank you !

MK7

24 Mar 09 at 11:11 am
Hiya, great plugin! Thanks. Is there a way to turn off the identifyer arrows in the footnote list? Many of my posts aren’t long enough to really need them. Or I could change the arrow to the word “locate,” but I think that removing the arrow would be best.

Cheers and thanks!
Dainis

Dainis

6 Apr 09 at 2:55 pm
Hi Dainis, There sure is. Just remove the text from those options on the plugin’s options page.

Simon

8 Apr 09 at 10:20 am
Hi,
First, sorry about my English, than;

That’s really cool plugin, but I’ve a problem with it. When I insert foot notes on a paginated post, and, if I were on, for example, 5. page, and I clicked on a footnote, the page was reloading, and directly went to the first page… ’cause I’ve seen that footnote link (for example) “post_134/#footnote_3_4″, but the paginated post’s link is on browser, “post_134/4/”… There’s missing page number…

Is there any idea about that?

must

29 Apr 09 at 1:23 am
Great plugin!

Unfortunately, the WP-Footnotes plugin is creating a conflicting with another plugin (articles2pdf), where the footnotes are not being correctly displayed (this is a problem with the other plugin).

Therefore, could you please tell me what action/filter I need to call to disable this plugin on specific PHP page?

Thanks in advance,

Mitul

Mitul

9 May 09 at 6:38 am
Hi Simon,thanks for your nice work.

But after I activate the WP-Footnotes I got the following error message:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at F:2.WorkShop0.Virtual OSxampplitehtdocswordpresswp-contentpluginswp-footnotesfootnotes.php:1) in F:2.WorkShop0.Virtual OSxampplitehtdocswordpresswp-contentpluginssubscribe-to-commentssubscribe-to-comments.php on line 817

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at F:2.WorkShop0.Virtual OSxampplitehtdocswordpresswp-contentpluginswp-footnotesfootnotes.php:1) in F:2.WorkShop0.Virtual OSxampplitehtdocswordpresswp-includespluggable.php on line 850

I really want to have this plugin work, can you help me?
Thanks very much.

jecoso

16 May 09 at 4:56 pm
In the settings page, I see the following error:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in [[My webosite root]]/root/wp-content/plugins/wp-footnotes/footnotes.php on line 258

Dion

18 May 09 at 5:05 pm
i don’t know how to use it. i can’t

storyteller Nguyễn

20 May 09 at 7:42 pm
thank emeğe sayğı paylaşımlar için tşk

adem

27 May 09 at 8:16 pm
Perfect–thanks. BTW, any chance a footnote can be added to the title of a post?

Howie

1 Jun 09 at 5:11 pm
hi. Thank you for become available.

charles

2 Jun 09 at 4:25 am
Hi Simon,

I find it rather annoying that the superscript footnotes are the same size as normal text. It makes every line with a footnote stand out. Where is the parameter I need to change in order to fix this?
Thanks alot.

Luca

2 Jun 09 at 8:51 pm
Hi folks. I’m aware there are a few questions backing up here. Sorry, I’ve been flat out at my new job (and still am). Here are some quick attempts at answers.

@must That’s a known limitation of the current version. Hopefully I’ll get time to address that in a future version, sorry.

@Mitul Hopefully you’ve already figured out a solution. If not, I’m afraid I can’t be of much help - I just don’t have the time right now, sorry.

@jecoso I’m not sure what the problem is there. I’ll have to investigate further when I get the time and see if I can fix whatever the bug is in the next version.

@Dion I’ll look into it when I get the chance.

@storyteller Have you read the instructions?

@Howie That would be totally possible with a small modification, but I probably won’t consider it as a feature since it would break the vast majority of themes.

@Luca You’ll need to learn a little bit of CSS. I’d suggest you look into the line-height property.

Simon

2 Jun 09 at 11:45 pm
Thank you very much! It works fine if I increase ‘line-height’ from 1.4em to 1.8em. But by doing so, I ruin the layout as a whole. Is there some parameter for the ’superscript font size’ too? I’ve tried ctrl+f-ing the stylesheet already, but I don’t know any CSS…

Thanks alot again

Luca

3 Jun 09 at 5:45 am
sup {font-size:10px}

Simon

3 Jun 09 at 11:06 pm
Great Plugin! What about highlighting the footnote as it is practiced at Wikipedia?

Nick

8 Jun 09 at 12:49 pm
Hi Nick,

Thanks for the suggestion. You should be able to achieve this just by adding a single line to your CSS file. Try:

.footnotes li:target {background:#aaa;}

Simon

9 Jun 09 at 2:24 am
Great, thank you very much!

Nick

17 Jun 09 at 3:13 pm
The plug-in still works in WP 2.8 but activating it hoses the Dashboard. (Several other plugins do the same.) Any ideas why?

Chris

19 Jun 09 at 1:37 pm
I’m not sure why that might be, sorry Chris. I’ll look into it when I get the chance. Footnotes aren’t currently a high priority (clients come first), but I will get to it; the pressure is building.

Simon

20 Jun 09 at 7:29 am
http://www.cinselseks.com/cinsel-sorunlar

ayşen

21 Jun 09 at 8:17 pm
Я думаю, что Вы допускаете ошибку. Могу отстоять свою позицию. Пишите мне в PM, пообщаемся.

Знакомства

23 Jun 09 at 4:29 am
the footnotes plugin does not work with the wp-print-plugin. It doesn’t show a printable version.

Thanx anyhow!

david

23 Jun 09 at 7:11 am
Очень понравился ваш блог! Подписался на rss. Буду регулярно читать.

MignInvaria

2 Jul 09 at 2:40 pm