Today I’m glad to announce the “Sidenotes” plug-in I’ve been working on for quite some time. After some testing and localization work I think it’s ready to be released!

Let’s make some words about this plug-in: My overall goal during development was: Keep it simple and don’t lose sight of the primary goal! I didn’t want to code something that becomes complex and user-unfriendly after a while. Sidenotes should provide the possibility to easily add “advanced links”, showing a title, a brief description of the link target and the date the user has posted the note. Similar to your link list or blog roll, side notes can be displayed e.g. in your sidebar – of course providing an additional RSS feed for easy syndication.

See the result at the bottom of my homepage! If you have any ideas, problems or suggestions, just drop me a note!

Download latest “Sidenotes” release from WordPress Plugin Directory

Installation

• Like many other WordPress plug-ins “Sidenotes” can be easily installed by copying the “sidenotes”-folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
• Copy sidenotes-rss.php from your /wp-content/plugins/ directory to your root directory (where you can also find files like wp-app.php, wp-atom.php,…)
• Activate the plug-in through the “Plugins” menu in your WordPress admin panel and do some additional setup in the “Settings” menu if you want.
• Write your first side note within the “Tools” menu
• Place get_sidenotes() somewhere in your code

FAQ

1. I want to show my sidenotes in a list – as it is defined by default.
   You have to enclose your function call, e.g. <?php get_sidenotes() ?> with <ul> tags

Change log

2009-09-14
v0.9: Initial version

2009-09-21
v0.9.1: Bug Fix: Cyrillic language support

2009-09-22
v0.9.2: Bug Fix: Display date / time in local language

2009-09-24
v.0.9.3: New feature: Output all (or specific number of) Sidenotes via <?php get_sidenotes_archives() ?>