Hey. thanks for your port.
Our Footnotes short code has the following syntax:
<start tag>your footnote example text</end tag>
You can use a pre defined start and end tag or define your own. You do not need to add the numbers. Our plugin automatically adds them in a couter style or your chpose (arabic numbers, leading zero, romanic, lating characters).
You can also junst install the plugin, it provides an example of How to use and how it will look like without changing a text in your posts/pages.
Hope that information helps.
Thanks, Stefan.
I ended up using the WordPress Search Regex plugin to find all instances of my old footnotes and replace them with the new [ref]footnote content[/ref] style that your plugin uses.
For anyone interested in doing the same thing when they convert from the FD Footnotes plugin, install Search Regex, then go to its search screen (from the Dashboard, go to Tools/Search Regex). In “search pattern”, enter the following:
@\[[0-9]+\. ([^\]]*)\]@
This tells the plugin to search for any string of characters that:
- Begins with a square opening bracket
- followed by one or more digits
- followed by a period and a space
- then contained some content
- and finally ended with a square closing bracket.
In other words, it finds and selects all of the old footnotes[1. You know, the ones that look like this.].
When you want to replace the old FD footnotes with the new style, enter this in the “Replace pattern” field:
[ref]$1[/ref]
This removes the old footnotes and replaced them with [ref][/ref] tags, while preserving the old footnotes’ content. You could instead replace the [ref] with (( or <ref>, or whatever your custom footnotes shortcode is.
Make sure the “Regex” box is clicked, and click the “Replace” button once to get a preview of the changes that will be made. When you’re reviewed them and are sure everything looks good, click “Replace & Save”.
If your old footnotes didn’t contain a space after the period, remove the space from the “search pattern”. You’ll get this instead:
@\[[0-9]+\.([^\]]*)\]@
Anyway, thanks for chiming in, Stefan, and I hope that my answer here is helpful to anyone who encounters the same dilemma in the future.
Wow.
Thanks for your helppul guide how to change the footnotes short code.
We also want to implement this replacement function in our Plugin in the feature to convert footnotes short codes in posts/pages.
But that will take a lot of time and testing.
Hi Southwest
Cheers for this super-awesome write-up!
May I use this as a description for other possible “converts”?
It must have taken you a good chunk of your time to firstly switch over and secondly even write the helpful advise. I’d like these hours of yours to be of use for a lot of other people as well. So: Where would you put that information, so a lot of people will stumble upon it?
Mark, you most certainly may!
When I post support topics on the internet, I always try to include the solutions when I find them, in case other people have the same problem, because I know how frustrating it is to have a tech issue, find a forum post that describes the exact problem… but has no solution!
It didn’t take that much time, though. The hardest part was trying to remind myself how regular expressions work!
You’re welcome to copy that text into a blog post or a documentation entry if you would like, and modify it as you see fit. Perhaps you could link to it in the FAQ section of the plugin page? I’ll probably post it on my own site eventually, although not in the next week, as I’m just about to go off on vacation!
Cheers!
Be aware that by default, Search Regex doesn’t search in custom post types but only posts and pages.
In the event that anyone needs to do the conversion described by Southwest and you are using custom post types, there is a small modification that needs to be done to one of the Search Regex plugin files as described here. You will need to add each custom post type that you want Search Regex to search within. Very easy modification.
I just edited the file and then followed Southwest’s awesome conversion guide. Search Regex was then able to find and replace the footnotes on my custom post types perfectly. 🙂
Thanks, midihead! I don’t use custom post types, so I wouldn’t have realized that if you hadn’t pointed it out.
