Plugin Release: Disclaimers

Posted on by Ben Keith

Let's start with some ancient history. Our flagship WordPress theme, Largo, descends from work that NPR did in the early 2010s under the name The Argo Network. The network's work included best-practices recommendations for working with WordPress in news, published at the Argo Project, and an open-source WordPress theme called Argo, which INN forked in 2012.

Fast-forward a few years. INN was working on a big refresh of WisconsinWatch.org for the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, and was bringing in new features in Largo to support that refresh. The 0.4 release of Largo included a disclaimer widget that could be used to provide site-wide or per-article disclaimers and disclosures.

Today, we're happy to announce that that functionality is available to all WordPress users, with the launch of the Disclaimers plugin. 🎉

The plugin's site-wide settings page, showing an example setting of "This is an example sitewide disclaimer."
The plugin's site-wide settings page, showing an example setting.
The widget settings page, showing the Disclaimers widget added to the "Article Bottom" widget area. The active theme is Largo.
The widget settings page, showing the Disclaimers widget added to the "Article Bottom" widget area. The active theme is Largo.
The Disclaimers widget, displaying a sitewide disclaimer, set at the bottom of an article.
The Disclaimers widget, displaying a sitewide disclaimer, set at the bottom of an article using the Largo theme.
With the Twenty Seventeen theme active, this site has chosen to put the Disclaimer widget at the top of the sidebar.
With the Twenty Seventeen theme active, this site has chosen to put the Disclaimer widget at the top of the sidebar.
Here's what the per-post settings look like on a site using the Gutenberg editor plugin. The same subset of HTML is supported in this box as your site supports in the post body.
Here's what the per-post settings look like on a site using the Gutenberg editor plugin. The same subset of HTML is supported in this box as your site supports in the post body.
A screenshot of a post in Twenty Seventeen displaying a more-complex disclaimer with HTML bold, strong, emphasized, italic, and link tags in use.
A screenshot of a post in Twenty Seventeen displaying a more-complex disclaimer with HTML bold, strong, emphasized, italic, and link tags in use.

Largo sites running any current version of Largo don't need to install this plugin now, but we will be removing the corresponding disclaimers functionality from Largo in the next release. The migration process will be as painless as we can make it, with all your existing disclaimers carried forward.

Stay tuned for more plugin announcements in the coming months! You can subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Twitter at @innnerds to receive updates. Or, just watch our blog here. We even have an RSS feed!