It’s been years since I’ve used WP-Footnotes and can’t remember how it functioned now – were footnotes embedded using double brackets? ie:
((footnoted content))
I recently installed Easy Footnotes (https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-footnotes/) on a site, and it seems to be working well. The insertion indicators are:
[efn_note]footnoted content[/efn_note]
I’m not sure if Easy Footnotes lets you easily change the method of insertion from the default to double brackets, but if not could do a database search/replace of all your insertion labels (making sure not to replace any double brackets in php code, of course).
where ‘good’ = for instance, to avoid this situation again in the future
I don’t think there’s high demand for footnotes in WordPress, so there’s not much incentive for developers to create or maintain them. My guess is that as long as you want to use footnotes, you’ll encounter this issue again in future.
There may be other choices, but this one seems to be the most used, currently.
Check this out for possibilities of changing the insertion indicator :
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/change-shortcode-7/
Because I’m easily distracted from what I should be doing, I just noticed that one of my sites is still using an old plugin called simply “footnotes” (https://wordpress.org/plugins/footnotes/), which also uses double brackets as footnote indicators. However, it is also no longer maintained or available for download, though it seems it still works.
However, I tried installing Easy Footnotes to see if I could change the efn_note shortcode to double brackets. The author’s provided function only lets you change the shortcode though, not the square brackets around it, so not likely to work for conversion (at least at my level of php competence).
Instead, I did a database search-and-replace of my _posts table to change the double brackets in all of my posts to the plugin’s shortcode (instead of phpMyAdmin, I use Better Search and Replace Pro, which I highly recommend). It worked perfectly. All old footnotes still work with the new Easy Footnotes plugin.
(However, if you prefer, let me know and I’ll send you the zip of my old footnotes plugin).
