As I’ve mentioned yesterday, I do want to share another plugin from Matthias Kittsteiner and the Epiphyt brand. Today, I want to present his plugin Impressum Plus. The term “Impressum” is mostly used on German website, and is of latin origin. It comes from books and magazines, where it lists the people responsible for the media. It can be found on almost all German websites, since it is mandatory, when the site is not purely private/personal, which is hardly possible. On translated pages, you often find the translated term “Imprint”, which is not really the same. There is no real equivalent in many other countries, but you would typically find sites like “Legal Notice” with similar content. Nevertheless, there are certain things such a page must list, and this is where Impressum Plus comes into play.

What does Impressum Plus do?

There is a free version, simply called “Impressum“, which can generate all the required content for such a page. It is not limited to German speaking countries, but can also be used for those how would have a “Legal Notice” page. It offers you some text fields and fieldsets for your name, address, email address, phone number, entity type, and many more. You can then either use a block or a shortcode to place it on a page and have it dynamically generate the final page. You can choose to include headlines or only write down the content without any headlines in between.

In the “Plus” version, it also offers the dynamic generation of the privacy policy and the accessibility information pages. The generation of up-to-date privacy policy pages can be a time-consuming task, that needs to be done regularly. If you don’t want to do that manually, then the plus version might help you here.

Why I use Impressum Plus?

I have to admit, that I do not use it on my German site, yet. But I do use it on the English site of this blog. I usually used one of these “Privacy Policy Generators” and manually edited them to fit the services I use on this blog. When Impressum Plus was first released, I bought a license to replace this manual page. This was almost 6 years ago. 😅

I have even customized it a bit, since the plugin offers some filters to change the dynamically generated text. I use one combined page for the Impressum and privacy policy and I needed to change the heading levels, which I did with this “hack”:

function ipc_privacy_policy_content( $policy ) {
	$headline_level_increase = 1;

	return preg_replace_callback(
		'#<(/?)h(\d)>#',
		function ( $match ) use ( $headline_level_increase ) {
			$new_headline_level = intval( $match[2] + $headline_level_increase );

			return "<{$match[1]}h{$new_headline_level}>";
		},
		$policy
	);
}
add_filter( 'impressum_privacy_policy_content', 'ipc_privacy_policy_content' );

There are some more (and better) filters in newer versions, which you can find in the developer documentation.

Conclusion

If you need to have an Impressum, which you most likely need to have, unless your website is password protected and only for your family, then having the Impressum generated for you saves you time and protects you from legal risks, as the requirements changes from time to time. This is even more true for privacy policy pages. Impressum Plus is the only premium plugin I have a subscription for, but it lets me be less stressed about these pages. Now I only need to finally also use it on my German site. 😁