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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.

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

In case people are keeping track here and not over at the plugin repository, WP-Footnotes has been updated to version 2.2.

There are some pretty major changes behind the scenes since the 1.x versions of the plugin, but usage is pretty much the same. Check the plugin’s page for all the usage details and a download link.

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

1. Upload the footnotes folder and all it’s contents to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. 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 <!--startnum=5--> 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 copyright © 2007 Simon Elvery

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.

1. Your very own footnote! [↩]
2. 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)). [↩]
3. Yes, that means you can, if you like, continue using the old mark-up <footnote>like this</footnote>. [↩]
4. That’s the little number bit. [↩]
5. 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. [↩]
6. That is, between each <!--nextpage--> tag. [↩]
7. Like this. [↩] [↩]
8. 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. [↩]
9. Specifically, only WordPress 2.1.1 and 2.1.2. [↩]
10. Although I haven’t yet had any problems on this website with these plugins. [↩]
11. Much more rapidly than in the past. [↩]

This has now been upgraded and superseded. Check out the latest version.

Because of Rob’s comments I have updated the plugin so it now works with the excellent WP-Amazon plugin. While I was in the code, I decided I’d add a couple of new features as well.

You can now choose whether or not the numbered links in the text should display as superscript or not.^[1] You can now also customise the backlink text. Many sites like to use this little guy: ↩ (↩).^[2]

You can access all the options in the Footnotes tab of the Options section in Admin.

I have kept comments closed on this post. Please use the original post to make comments on the Footnotes plugin Feedback here and bugs and feature requests here. You can also view all the changes there as well. Here is the download link if you just want to get straight to it.

1. I did this because I noticed a number of blogs around the net that display the link as normal text so I figured I should offer that functionality. [↩]
2. This also better accomodates people using this Plugin iwith different languages. [↩]