From ‘Easy’ to ‘Made Easy’: Footnotes on WordPress

Last night, I could­n’t hold back any­more: I replaced Easy Foot­notes with Foot­notes Made Easy. Too sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly unat­trac­tive was the result of Easy Foot­notes.

Solution

• Install the plu­g­in Foot­notes Made Easy.
• If still nec­es­sary, install the plu­g­in Bet­ter Search Replace.
• Open Bet­ter Search Replace.
• Select all tables
• Insert [efn_note] into the search field.
• Insert a blank fol­lowed by two opened brack­ets into the replace field.
• Make a test run.
• Let the replace­ments be exe­cut­ed.
• Insert [/efn_note] into the search field.
• Insert )) into the replace­ment field.
• Make a test run.
• Let the replace­ments be exe­cut­ed.
• Delete the plu­g­in Easy Foot­notes.

Background

The plu­g­in Easy Foot­notes has 2 pecu­liar­i­ties. First, it sets the foot­note text in the title of the link: <a title="Here is the footnote text">. So, the abil­i­ty to design the foot­note via CSS is very lim­it­ed. Sec­ond, it builds the ref­er­ence in accor­dance with the pat­tern <a ...><sup>Reference</sup></a>. This makes the under­line appear on the line base­line, not direct­ly under the super­script ref­er­ence — which looks ugly. And replac­ing it via CSS is just not pos­si­ble.

Remains the oblig­a­tory ques­tion about the FOSS sta­tus of Foot­notes Made Easy: It’s ‘GPL‑2.0‑or-later’ licensed¹. So my Open-Source eyes say: all is well.

1. cf. readme.txt), and the last update is from Novem­ber 2022. ((cf. Devel­op­ers [↩]