A few years ago I adopted a footnotes plugin, which I forked as Footnotes Made Easy. My plugin makes use of double brackets to indicate text that you wish to appear in a footnote. Settings allows you to change how it appears, including the symbols used.
I’ve not done a huge amount with it and now, with WordPress 6.3 released, there’s much less a reason to even use it. You see, WordPress 6.3 added an easy-to-use footnotes block. It doesn’t have many options, and my plugin does add a lot more features, but for most people it’s more than sufficient.
In comparison, here’s how you use the new core feature with the block editor…
- Add the new Footnotes block to where you wish the footnotes text to appear. It will appear like this…
- Now, when typing text use the down-arrow1 on the toolbar and select “Footnotes”…
- It will move you down to where you put your earlier block and allow you to enter the footnotes text…
- Where you inserted it will now have a link to the footnote…
And that’s it. It’s intelligent too – add an extra footnote previous to another and it will renumber them all automatically, so they always appear in order of how they do in the post.
For most people, all of this will be enough for their needs. I’m a big believer of keeping things simple – sadly, there’s no conversion path from my plugin to this, so it’s a manual process. And I’m not too proud to say I’m doing exactly that on this site, with the plan to remove Footnotes Made Easy in due course.
Talk to me!