Category: Development

How to use blocks to add footnotes in WordPress 6.3

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.
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14th August 2023
I have no idea who this is

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— WordPress.com (@wordpressdotcom) August 8, 2023

12th August 2023
New in AI: Not this site
Tumblr has pushed out a change to prevent OpenAI from scraping their content, and I’m duplicating what they’ve done here.

OpenAI’s instructions for blocking GPTBot should discourage OpenAI, including ChatGPT. The solution is, thankfully, simple – just add the following to your site’s robots.txt file…
```
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
```
11th August 2023
How not to advertise in WordPress Plugins

Ask most users what they hate most about what WordPress plugins do and they’ll say “banner ads”. Drill down further, though, and you’ll find that it’s any kind of advertising within WP Admin.

Used to up-sell an audience to a premium version of the product, it’s understandable. But what if it’s to a different product entirely? What if it’s a free one? Then it REALLY does get annoying, particularly when it’s outside of the individual plugin’s pages and is splashed across the whole of WP Admin.

In this post I’m going to show some examples of behaviours, what the issue is, and suggestion some alternatives for developers as well.
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28th July 2023
Why WordPress developers shouldn’t restyle menu titles

Install enough plugins on a WordPress site and you’ll soon come across some that make various style changes to make themselves stand out in the menu.

In this post I’m going to look at some examples of this, explore the reasoning behind it but also explain what the issues are with doing it.
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25th July 2023