Cancel

Jeff Chandler

Easily Add Citations to Quotes With the Better Blockquotes Plugin

Better Blockquotes is a free WordPress plugin created by Devin Price that makes it easy to add citations to blockquotes. When a user clicks the blockquote button with no text highlighted, a dialogue box pops up with options to add a quote, citation, and a citation link.

Better Blockquote Options
Better Blockquote Options

Citations are inserted into the post with HTML5 markup. The blockquote button retains its default behaviour with highlighted text. I tested the plugin on WordPress 4.4 beta 3 and it works as advertised.

I did notice however, that the citation displays immediately after the last character in the quote. I’d prefer to have

a space between the last character and the citation.

Better Blockquotes in the Visual Editor
Better Blockquotes in the Visual Editor

An example of how better blockquotes looks in a post.

How a Blockquote Looks in a Post
How a Better Blockquote Looks in a Post

Based on feedback, Price says he’ll attempt to add it to WordPress core as an enhancement. Is better blockquotes something you’d like to see added to WordPress?

Category:
Tags: ,

SHARE THIS:

LIKE THIS

16 Comments

16 responses to “Easily Add Citations to Quotes With the Better Blockquotes Plugin”

  1. I think this could be a useful enhancement for those who don’t enjoy or can’t type code in the code editor. I can see my clients possibly taking advantage of this either as a standalone plugin or as an enhancement to WordPress.

    • No, it’s not being added to WordPress. If feedback considers it a good addition to WordPress, then Devin will likely put in a trac ticket and patch to have it added to WordPress.

  3. I definitely like the idea and think it would be a good addition to core. And I would guess it’s probably not that hard to tweak the styling so you get a line break before the person being quoted.

  4. I include a lot of citations in my writing. I like the useability of this plugin so far as the back-end is concerned, but hate what it produces on the front-end.

    Depending on the site, I have used endnotes, sidenotes, and/or hovernotes, and I must say that I think all of them provide a much better experience for the reader than this plugin.

    Combining the back-end of this plugin with the ability to display the references as one or more of endnotes, sidenotes, and hovernotes would be much more tempting.

  5. Not something I can see being a good addition to core. I like the plugin and appreciate what it does. But it serves it’s best use as an optional plugin, extending functionality where and when needed. It’s not essential to the blockquote element. If people felt there was a real need to extend functionality then add the cite element as an option within text (as, at its core, thats what this plugin is doing. But even that i think is too specific).

  6. I think this should go into core. It will help many users who can’t do that in HTML and it won’t break something for anyone else. And the output will be handled by the theme. +1 from me.

    • WordPress Tavern | Torsten commented on Easily Add Citations to Quotes With the Better Blockquotes Plugin

      I think at the very least, if it goes into core, it should only be available to the visual editor. I think it’s safe to assume, at least for the most part, that if you’re using the text editor, you’re comfortable with code. There are still some hangers-on within the blindness WordPress user space who are using the text editor in place of the visual editor, but with the accessibility experience of the visual editor having vastly improved, that’s no longer a necessary workaround for screen reader users.

    • I agree. This makes it easier for the average user to add quotes and it wouldn’t look strange since we already of something similar for links, so why not?

  8. Hi Jeffro. Thanks for testing it out and giving feedback! I brought it up in the #core-editor meeting yesterday (https://make.wordpress.org/core/2015/11/03/weekly-editor-chat-resumed/) and opened a core ticket (https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/34584).

    Ella had an interesting suggest for perhaps using placeholders instead of a pop-up (similar to what Medium does for some content). You can read back through the conversation if interested in the #core-editor log.

    My plugin doesn’t output any styles, which is the reason blockquote citations will appear differently in various themes (including slightly wonky in yours). Theme authors would need to style blockquote markup and account for citations- but at least we would have standardized markup to base that on.

  9. I would have jumped on this right away but PressThis does a nice job of citing sources and I can create the post from the bookmarklet. At this point I don’t see myself using another plugin.

  10. It should also work for text that’s highlighted, and automatically populate the quote box. It should also account for the fact that quotes often contain formatting themselves.

    And a proper citation (by MLA, APA and Chicago rules) often requires formatting itself, such as normal for author, italic for publication name, back to normal for publisher.

    A plugin that accommodated more of the scope of what citations can and should contain would definitely be worth looking into.

  12. Sounds great! Just as long as we can add basic formatting (bold, italic, etc.) to the blockquote text. I’ll wait for WordPress to add this to core (I hope they do!) instead of adding yet another plugin to my site.

You may also like

Newsletter

Subscribe Via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Get updates from WP Tavern

Subscribe now to receive email updates directly in your inbox.

Continue reading