Wordpress References Plugin

February 4th, 2005

Some of the Internet’s strongest attributes in my humble opinion, are the “Three F’s”™ : Freedom, Fluidity and FUD.

In my pursuit of the “Second F” - Fluidity, I have created a small wordpress plugin to allow easy referencing of ones source material. (Think bibliographies people!)

This plugin was created out of personal necessity, rather than as a conscious contribution to the wordpress community, and as a result it is still a little rough around the edges. However, I thought a few people might find some need for such a function, so here it is.

references-0.2.zip
references-0.2.tar.gz
references-0.3.zip
references-0.3.tar.gz
references-0.3.1.zip
references-0.3.1.tar.gz

Full installation instructions are available in the README.txt within the above packages. A changelog is also included in this file, so you can see what fixes/improvements have been made in subsequent upgrades.

Basically, what this plugin allows you to do is create a list of your “source material” for a particular post, much like a quazi-footnotes type system. In keeping with the tradition of what I consider the better portion of the internet, referencing of your source material not only lends an essence of validity and legitimacy to what you are saying, but also preserves what we all came to know and love about the internet: links!

I am not talking about links in their current form in which they are used and abused, I mean genuinely relevent and related links that were referenced or referred to in a given article, or are at least related to the topic at hand. Remember those?

An example of the references plugin in use can be seen below, as well as on the main page of this site.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 4th, 2005 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

20 Responses to 'Wordpress References Plugin'

  1. Gravatar 1 Scott Sauyet Says:

    This sounds interesting, but the download isn’t working right now.

    I’d love to see it when that’s fixed.

  2. Gravatar 2 Scott Sauyet Says:

    It’s working now. I’ll take a look soon.

    — Scott

  3. Gravatar 3 John B. Abela Says:

    Hello, First: Thank You!!!
    This was a major requirement for me, and I was sort of amazed I couldn’t find a way to do with the default install of WordPress (heck, maybe there is in the latest version and I just haven’t found it).

    Anyway, I found a small typo within the install file and thought I’d share it so others out there don’t get stumped.

    (5) Add a custom field to your post called ‘references’.

    SHOULD BE:

    (5) Add a custom field to your post called ‘reference’.

    Note the (s) at the end. If you use the (s) it won’t work ;)

    All that said, again, thank you!
    John B. Abela

  4. Gravatar 4 Adam Says:

    Thanks John.

    It seems the README is always the place I make my worst typos, as they are never immediately apparent, unlike a PHP function, which simpy won’t run.

    Plugin updated and repackaged to reflect the change (v0.3.1).

  5. Gravatar 5 sw’as » New WordPress Plugin: Footnotes Says:

    [...] ll such as Textile 2.0 5. There are also footnote Plugins out there for WordPress done by MovableTripe and Alex King 6. Anyway, I’m releasing my footnotes plugin as my first “released [...]

  6. Gravatar 6 Brian Bonner Says:

    I know I am missing something, but I don’t get it. How does it provide references? I type in my references all the time. How does this help?

  7. Gravatar 7 Adam Says:

    It doesn’t ‘provide’ the references for you - that would be impossible. It is merely an ordered list. Nothing less, nothing more. Basically, it just simplifies the process of all of the typing and markup required to produce such a list at the end of every post.

    Like any of my dodgy code, if it helps you, great! If it doesn’t, no harm done.

  8. Gravatar 8 Bora Bora Says:

    i’m trying to download but i get an error message
    “Sorry, no downloads avalible.???”

  9. Gravatar 9 Adam Says:

    Sorry about that. I had a database crash earlier this week, and the stats table for the downloads was corrupted.

    All is fixed.

  10. Gravatar 10 laptop Says:

    Thanks for it …exactly wat i was looking for! :)

  11. Gravatar 11 Fred Says:

    how do i make my reference links show a word instead of the url? how should i put url and description in the ‘values’ section of ‘custom fields’?

    sorry if i sound stupid, i’ve been really cracking my head up trying to figure this out.

  12. Gravatar 12 k.a. ødegård Says:

    I noticed this as well and just gave up and did the usual, e.g.

    [a href="http://www.example.com"]Example URL[/a] … etc. (wish I could make the proper code display correctly here, but alas.)

    So…still coding by hand, here. ;-) In the WP post editor (if you’ve got the rich text editor on, which even in 2.0.1 is still dodgy itself, what with randomly losing half of one’s text, or slicing out a few key words here and there) you can create your own unordered list.

    I’ll play with it more, though. Seems like a good idea all around, I’m just not sure I grok the utility of this particular articulation of that idea just yet. But then, it’s Saturday night. I have Weekend Brain. :-)

  13. Gravatar 13 Endeveit Says:

    Can you give some examples on items 5 and 6 of README-file?
    I have’t understood them :(

  14. Gravatar 14 Troped Says:

    Hey MovableTripe, I’ve also been interested in creating a runnnig bibliography for my blog. I went about it in a slightly different fashion because I am freuqently referencing the same material again and again. In case you’re interested, what I’ve done is create a blog entry for whatever book, article, web page I’m referencing and then I title it using the academic shorthand, like (Haugeland 1997). The post contains the bibliographic information and I also enter the post into the SH-autolink system in Wordpress, and after that, every time I type the reference, it links to the source. This way you can also categorize the posts as “Bibliography” or “References” and that archive page becomes a running bibliography. I wrote a post illustrating the whole process with an example if anyone wants to know more.

  15. Gravatar 15 Troped Says:

    Hey MovableTripe, I’ve also been interested in creating a runnnig bibliography for my blog. I went about it in a slightly different fashion because I am freuqently referencing the same material again and again. In case you’re interested, what I’ve done is create a blog entry for whatever book, article, web page I’m referencing and then I title it using the academic shorthand, like (Haugeland 1997). The post contains the bibliographic information and I also enter the post into the SH-autolink system in Wordpress, and after that, every time I type the reference, it links to the source. This way you can also categorize the posts as “Bibliography” or “References” and that archive page becomes a running bibliography. I wrote a post illustrating the whole process with an example if anyone wants to know more.

  16. Gravatar 16 Troped Says:

    Sorry about the double-post, folks. I’m not used to using CoComment yet!

  17. Gravatar 17 Mark Says:

    Sorry, no downloads avalible.

    :(

  18. Gravatar 18 Adam Says:

    Mark,

    Sorry about that. I had a permissions problem which was restricting downloads.

    All should be good again.

    Adam.

  19. Gravatar 19 WP Plugins DB » Plugin Details » References Says:

    [...] Visit [...]

  20. Gravatar 20 Fendy Siamala's Weblog » Weblog Update Completed Says:

    [...] References 0.3.1 beta [...]

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