Biggest Impressum update in years

Published: May 22, 2025 by Matze – Leave a comment Last update: June 1, 2025

More than three years, 2.0.x was the current version for my free Impressum plugin. This changes today with the first feature update since then. And aside of that, Impressum Plus gets new features, too.

New fields

Similar to Impressum Plus, Impressum now got also a field for a contact form page as alternative to the phone number. While (German) law requires to provide a fast electronic contact method aside of the email address, it doesn’t need to be a phone number. Thus, you can also use a page with a contact form, if you can make sure that you’re able to answer it within one hour.

Additionally, there is a new field to add the Business ID for German users. Since this field is not limited to corporations, it’s now also part of Impressum. If you already publish your VAT ID, you don’t need to add your Business ID, if available. If you don’t have a Business ID yet, but have a business, you need to wait until you get one, which should happen during the current year.

If you have not VAT ID and as soon you get your Business ID, you need to add it to your imprint.

Aside of this, the VAT ID check has been improved and now requires the two or three characters before the actual numeric value of the VAT ID.

JavaScript tabs

Also coming from Impressum Plus, the settings tabs are now properly usable via JavaScript and don’t require loading a whole new page while switching, making them working as proper tabs as intended. Since the current solution im Impressum Plus was not properly accessible, their accessibility has been improved a lot now.

Impressum as base for Impressum Plus

Until now, Impressum and Impressum Plus were two completely separate plugins. That made the code for the imprint part and settings highly redundant and also lead to inconsistent behaviors for identical features, as code improvements not always found their way into both plugins.

Starting with Impressum 2.1.0 and Impressum Plus 2.12.0, Impressum is always the base plugin and Impressum Plus is always extending it, and thus both plugins share the same base.

This makes also switching from Impressum to Impressum Plus easier, as you don’t have to disable Impressum anymore (while still recommended). If it’s activated, it will always used as base. If it’s not available, Impressum Plus ships with Impressum as requirement and loads it from there.

(Soon) removed field information

While Impressum got two new fields, Impressum Plus becomes one part removed. Since the European Commission discontinues their Online Dispute Resolution platform on July 20th, 2025, which previously made it required to link to it for certain corporations, it will now be removed from the plugin at this date and won’t be displayed anymore.

Accessibility issues

Aside of the fixed accessibility issues regarding the tabs in Impressum Plus, editing field titles in the settings page is now also as accessible as possible with several fixes at this end.

That’s it

That were the biggest changes for Impressum 2.1.0 and Impressum Plus 2.12.0. For all changes, please visit the changelog for Impressum and the changelog for Impressum Plus in the documentation.