Sidenote Plugin

The problem.

Club Troppo’s Missing Link is a biweekly summary of the best of the Australian blogosphere. Because so much gets written in just a few days, each edition is produced by a team of editors coordinating their reviews and links in wiki, which is then copied to the website.

Unfortunately this makes it harder for editors to insert more personal remarks about links they’ve chosen, or links that other editors have chosen. To make the posts a bit more flavoursome, Jacques Chester (the technical type here at Club Troppo) introduced some CSS styles to allow sidenotes - styled callouts from the main body of the text. Until now this has required manually editing the raw markup of each entry once it has been posted.

The solution.

The search for a similar plugin led to the discovery of WP-Footnote, which performs part of the desired functionality. A few dozen changes by Jacques led to the development of Club Troppo’s WP-Sidenote, a plugin working along similar lines.

How to use the Sidenote plugin.

Wrapping any text in a pair of parentheses (aka ’round brackets’) and including an identifier will lead to its transformation into a side note. For example:

11. Jacques: This is a sidenote. [↩]

Will be turned into: A sidenote which appears to the right, complete with links11. Jacques: This is a sidenote. [↩]: —>

For more usage details, have a look at the WP-Footnote page.

Gotchas.

  • Incompatible with WP-Footnote.This plugin uses the same simple markup as the Footnote plugin, which means that they are incompatible. Perhaps in future they might be merged into a single plugin, but for now expediency has meant forking the original code.
  • Identifier required. This plugin also requires all sidenotes to have an identifier, marked by the tilde (~) character. If you don’t include it, the markup is not transformed into a sidenote.
  • Doesn’t play nice with right-floats. Images in particular tend to cause styling disagreements. You can modify the plugin’s CSS on its Options page, or you can make your images float-left if there’s a conflict.

Download.

You can download the plugin from here. To install, copy the sidenote folder into your plugins directory.

Legalese

As discussed above, WP-Sidenote is a hacked up variant of WP-Footnote. WP-Footnote is copyright © 2007 to Simon Elvery. All the modifications necessary to bring WP-Sidenote to life are copyright © 2007 Jacques Chester. Both plugins are covered by the GNU General Public License.

History

  • 0.9: Initial release
  • 0.9.1: Bugfix - multiple entries by same ident no longer causes unprocessed elements.