Hello, Buffer

Everything was beautiful. Not as beautiful as I would have liked¹ but acceptable in every respect except one: Footnotes were garbage. That tiny issue has resulted in a week of no progress, a lot of swearing, bad docs, blind alleys, obsolete advice, and still no closer.

I’ve dropped that post, starting again because I neglected to save the buffer and there is no re-fetch and edit option. I now know the publishing does not upload CSS, only the article body is uploaded, and the footnote mangle, which did not happen outside of Org2blog-WP, remains inexplicable, and persistent.

The Chrome browser View Source HTML makes no sense:

<div id="footnotes">
  <h2 class="footnotes">Footnotes: </h2>
  <div id="text-footnotes">
    <div class="footdef">
      <sup>
        <a id="fn.1" class="footnum" href="#fnr.1" role="doc-backlink">1</a>
      </sup>  </p> <!-- THE PHANTOM P :gm -->
      <div class="footpara" role="doc-footnote">
        <p class="footpara"> this would be the footnote text. </p>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

If I Inspect the footnote, I find a <p></p> inserted on a line by itself after the <sub> tag.

Two things: one is that stray closing P tag in Chrome View Source, the other is the footnote text in a P container that does not include the fn.1 anchor. It is my guess that stray tag is auto-completed by Chrome resulting in the Very Large Gap.

The stray tag does not appear in the WordPress editor receiving the generated post:

<div id="footnotes">
  <h2 class="footnotes">Footnotes:</h2>
  <div id="text-footnotes">
    <div class="footdef">
      <sup>
        <a id="fn.1" class="footnum" role="doc-backlink" href="#fnr.1">1</a>
      </sup>
      <div class="footpara" role="doc-footnote">
        <p class="footpara">the usual footnote sort of stuff.</p>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

And yet, if I switch the editor to View mode, the phantom gap paragraph is rendered!

Chrome may be attempting to fix mis-matched tags, which doesn’t explain why the phantom is inserted where it is, only trying to excuse its presence. But why would it only appear when rendered by WordPress? A plugin conflict?

It seems WP adding extraneous P tags is common, and while it says nothing about extra closing P tags, this offers a theme patch to drop all auto-P injections, and, great googley moogleys it works!

// Prevent WP from adding <p> tags on all post types
function disable_wp_auto_p( $content ) {
  remove_filter( 'the_content', 'wpautop' );
  remove_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'wpautop' );
  return $content;
}
add_filter( 'the_content', 'disable_wp_auto_p', 0 );

Which makes my Footnotes quite happy, which makes me happy too. I can move on, I just need to recall what it was I was doing 10 days ago when I hit this.