Footnotes Made Easy

Description

Footnotes Made Easy is a simple, but powerful, method of adding footnotes into your posts and pages.

Key features include…

  • Simple footnote insertion via double parentheses
  • Combine identical notes
  • Solution for paginated posts
  • Suppress Footnotes on specific page types
  • Option to display ‘pretty’ tooltips using jQuery
  • Lots of configuration options
  • And much, much more!

Footnotes Made Easy is a fork of WP Footnotes, a plugin by Simon Elvery which was abandoned some years ago.

Please visit the Github page for the latest code development, planned enhancements and known issues

Getting Started

Creating a footnote is incredibly simple – you just need to include your footnote in double parentheses, such as this…

This is a sentence ((and this is your footnote)).

The footnote will then appear at the bottom of your post/page.

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

Options

You have a fair few options on how the identifier links, footnotes and back-links look which can be found in the WordPress admin area under Settings -> Footnotes.

Paginated Posts

Some of you seem to like paginating post, which 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.

The only way to get around this is to know how many posts are on each page and tell Footnotes Made Easy what number you want the list to start at for each of the pages. So at some point on each page (that is, between each <!--nextpage--> tag) you need to add a tag to let the plugin 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 as you did the first time and the 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.

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.

Available in 8 Languages

Footnotes Made Easy is fully internationalized, and ready for translations.

Much thanks to the following translators for their contributions:

If you would like to add a translation to this plugin then please head to our Translating WordPress page

Screenshots

  • The Settings screen with advanced settings shown
  • Continuation of the settings screen with advanced settings shown
  • The post editor page showing how to to insert footnotes
  • Live preview of a post page showing footnotes within the page
  • Live preview of a post page showing list of footnotes at the bootom of the post

Installation

Footnotes Made Easy can be found and installed via the Plugin menu within WordPress administration (Plugins -> Add New). Alternatively, it can be downloaded from WordPress.org and installed manually…

  1. Upload the entire footnotes-made-easy folder to your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress administration.

Voila! It’s ready to go.

FAQ

How do I add a footnote to my post or page?

To add a footnote, surround the footnote text with the opening and closing footnote markers specified in the plugin settings. By default, these are (( and )).

Other than the available options, can the footnotes output be styled?

Yes it can. The easiest way is to use the CSS editor in your theme customizer. For example, ‘ol.footnotes’ refers to the footnotes list in general and ‘ol.footnotes li’ the individual footnotes.

Can I disable footnotes on specific parts of my website?

Yes, the plugin provides options to disable footnotes on the home page, archives, search results, feeds, and previews.

Reviews

Maarec 24, 2024 4 replies
Hello David, I'm sorry to hear you had to discontinue this plugin. But I have a problem now, as I've used footnotes on several of my blogs, the code is now shown in the text which gives a lot of clutter. Are you aware of another plugin which has the same setup, so I can keep using the shortcode I created? (I used a double (( -- text -- )) ) Thank you, Yolanda Update: I've changed the priority to 6 and now it's working again. But I'm still worried about the future.
Februari 19, 2024
This plugin has been excellent. I've used it to add footnotes to blogs to record the sources of material. Works very well.
Februari 18, 2024
As somebody who does academic and semi-academic work on my blog, I find this app to be simple to understand, easy to use, and entirely functional. Highly recommended.
Februari 12, 2024
The plugin worked with the default settings, but would not save any changes I made to the settings. The developer was initially helpful, but his suggestions did not help, and then he then stopped responding. This seemed like a red flag, so I decided not to use something that was not actively supported.
Februari 9, 2024
Happy with this plugin as a seamless replacement for an old footnotes plugin that had stopped working with php8.
Read all 36 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Footnotes Made Easy” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“Footnotes Made Easy” has been translated into 7 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Footnotes Made Easy” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

I use semantic versioning, with the first release being 1.0.

3.0.2

  • Maintenance: Updated this README to include the new contributor, more FAQs. Also updated the image assets (banner and icon)

3.0.1

  • Maintenance: Removed all the adoption notices.

3.0

  • Maintenance: Re-release of v1.0.4, to replace the updates added by another developer.

1.0.4

  • Bug: Well, I messed that release up and left some test dates in place. Apologies. This fixes it all now.

1.0.3

  • Maintenance: Added notices about the plugin closure

1.0.2

  • Bug: Fixed some bugs around settings getting saved (thanks to Rufus87)
  • Enhancement: Improved code to better meet VIP coding standards (not 100% yet but looking better!)
  • Enhancement: Added Github links to plugin meta. Added other useful meta as well
  • Enhancement: Minor enhancements to the way that field headings are shown in the settings
  • Enhancement: Added a further check to the settings savings function, to ensure it’s not called when it’s not needed (thanks to seuser)
  • Maintenance: Increased minimum PHP level 5.6 after reports of issues at 5.4. Upgrade people!
  • Maintenance: Removed some redundant code from where there used to be a button on the settings screen to reset all the options

1.0.1

  • Maintenance: Updated this README to display better in the new plugin repository. Also updated the image assets (banner and icon)
  • Maintenance: Minimum WordPress requirement is now 4.6. This means various checks and bits of code could be removed, including the languages folder, as this is now handled natively.

1.0

  • Initial release