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

I love sci­en­tif­ic writ­ing. Last night, I could­n’t hold back any­more. I need foot­notes on Word­Press that I can eas­i­ly apply to my posts with a good result! So, I replaced Easy Foot­notes with Foot­notes Made Easy. Too sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly unat­trac­tive was the result of Easy Foot­notes for me:

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.

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And how does this …

… sup­port our migra­tion to bootScore? Well, if a web design­er must aban­don her cur­rent Word­Press theme, she needs a replace­ment. A free ‘off-the-shelf’ theme, she prob­a­bly wants to per­son­al­ize. First a bit cos­met­i­cal­ly, then in terms of the gray val­ue of her pages, mul­ti­lin­gual­ism and inter­nal ref­er­ence tech­niques and link­ing. Final­ly, she per­haps enables spe­cial foot­ers, a sec­ondary menu or a copy­right notice before check­ing the SEO fea­tures of the select­ed theme. This is a way that this post sup­ports too.

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