Footnotes Made Easy

Description

Footnotes Made Easy is a simple, but powerful, method of adding footnotes to 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 the paginating post, which is kind of problematic. By default, each page of your post will have its 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.

Many thanks to the following translators for their contributions:

• David Artiss, English (UK)
• Mark Robson, English (UK)
• Annabelle W, English (UK)
• maboroshin, Japanese
• Laurent MILLET, French (France)
• B. Cansmile Cha, Korean
• danbilabs, Korean
• denelan, Dutch
• Peter Smits, Dutch
• Pieterjan Deneys, Dutch (Belgium)
• Alex Grey, Russian

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

Screenshots

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 www.ads-software.com 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

Plugin not updated anymore

JCV November 14, 2024

This plugin was great. Then the original developer got busy and passed it to another developper, who in months hasn’t fixed small bugs that users takes the time to report, claims to be PHP 8.2 compliant, which is not. I believe the new owner was the wrong choice.

What do I do with all my footnotes now?

yolandal March 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.

Very good plugin

slightestclue February 22, 2024

Simple and easy to use, works well without bugs.

Excellent plugin – simple yet versatile.

stephencactus July 10, 2024

This plugin has been excellent – and deserves its five stars. It works very well. I use it for adding academic style bibliographic references to web pages. I remain impressed with (a) the simplicity of this plugin for inserting footnotes, (b) the way it automatically numbers footnotes, (c) the way it manages duplicated references – such that only one footnote is created in these cases, and (d) the way footnotes themselves can contain a link. It makes adding and amending footnotes effortless. There was a minor hiatus about four months ago in support for this plugin but everything has been working perfectly since (as it was before). Both developers (David Artiss and Patrick Lumumba) were responsive at that time.

So useful

lmsanger February 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.

Disappointing

suchipsa February 12, 2024 2 replies

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.

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

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

3.0.5 [November 2, 2024]

• Maintenance: WordPress 6.7 Compatibility test passed.
• Maintenance: PHP 8.2 Compatibility test passed.
• Links on the options page updated.