WPSmith | WP Biographia

This plugin allows you to add a customisable biography to posts, to RSS feeds, to pages, to archives and to each post on your blog’s landing page. It integrates out of the box with the information that can be provided in each user’s profile and supports custom post types. Display of the Biography Box can be suppressed on a global or per user basis for posts, pages and custom post types as well as on a per category basis.

Settings and options include:

Choose when to display a Biography Box; on the front page, in archives, on individual posts, pages, or any other custom post type and in RSS feeds.
Choose the border style and background colour of the Biography Box
Choose the amount of user profile information displayed in the Biography Box
Choose the avatar image size
Choose to display the Biography Box at the top or the bottom of content (universally)
Choose to suppress the display of the Biography Box for pages, posts and posts/pages on a per user basis

The plugin expands and enhances the Contact Info section of your user profile, adding support for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Delicious, Flickr, Picasa, Vimeo, YouTube and Reddit profile links as well as Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, Windows Live Messenger and Jabber/Google Talk instant messaging profiles. Your Contact Info links can then be displayed as part of the Biography Box, either as plain text links or as icon links. Further contact links can easily be added to the Biography Box by using the wp_biographia_contact_info and wp_biographia_link_items filters.

The position of the Biography Box can be controlled by the plugin’s supported settings and options, or manually via the plugin’s shortcode ([wp_biographia]). See the Shortcode Support And Usage section for more information.

The position and content of the Biography Box, including adding support for new contact links, changing the content of the Biography Box when displayed via the shortcode, the format of the contact links and the overall format of the Biography Box can be modified by the plugin’s filters. See the Filter Support And Usage section for more information.

Download

Latest version: Download WP Biographia v3.1 [zip]

Installation

You can install WP Biographia automatically from the WordPress admin panel. From the Dashboard, navigate to the Plugins / Add New page and search for “WP Biographia” and click on the “Install Now” link.
Or you can install WP Biographia manually. Download the plugin Zip archive and uncompress it. Copy or upload the wp-biographia folder to the wp-content/plugins folder on your web server.
Activate the plugin. From the Dashboard, navigate to Plugins and click on the “Activate” link under the entry for WP Biographia.
Enhance your WordPress user profile. From the Dashboard, navigate to Users and click on the “Edit” link under your profile.
Edit your WordPress user profile. Add your biography to the “Biographical Info” text box. WP Biographia also adds to the list of Contact Info you can associate with your profile, adding support for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ and other contact profiles. Click on the “Update Profile” link to save your changes.
Customise and configure what information WP Biographia displays; From the Dashboard, navigate to the Settings / WP Biographia page or click on the “Settings” link from the Plugins page on the Dashboard.
You can can control display settings, style settings and content settings for the Biography Box.
Click on the “Save Changes” button to preserve your chosen settings and options.
If you enable the display of the post author’s image, make sure avatar support is turned on; from the Dashboard, navigate to Settings / Discussion and ensure that Show Avatars is enabled. Don’t forget to save your changes.
Users with the manage_options capability can edit their profile via Users / Your Profile from the Dashboard to suppress the display of the Biography Box on posts and/or on pages and also the profiles of other users via the Users / All Users / Edit from the Dashboard.
Suppression of the display of the Biography Box on posts and/or on pages can also be configured from the Dashboard; navigate to Settings / WP Biographia / Biography Box Display Settings and click on the Exclusions tab.

FAQ

Q. How do I get help or support for this plugin?
A. In short, very easily. But before you read any further, take a look at Asking For WordPress Plugin Help And Support Without Tears before firing off a question. In order of preference, you can ask a question on the WordPress support forum; this is by far the best way so that other users can follow the conversation. You can ask me a question on Twitter; I’m @vicchi. Or you can drop me an email instead. I can’t promise to answer your question but I do promise to answer and do my best to help.

Q. Is there a web site for this plugin?
A. Absolutely. Go to the WP Biographia home page for the latest information. There’s also the official WordPress plugin repository page and the source for the plugin is on GitHub as well.

Q. I’ve configured WP Biographia to display the author’s image but it’s not working; what’s happening here?
A. Author profile pictures, or avatars, are part of the WordPress core but enabling them isn’t done at the level of the user profile, instead it’s part of the way in which comments are configured. If you enable the display of the post author’s image, make sure avatar support is turned on; from the Dashboard, navigate to Settings / Discussion and ensure that Show Avatars is enabled. WordPress uses the email address that is part of your author’s profile to look up the right avatar image from gravatar.com, so you need to ensure that you’re using the same email address on your site as well as for your avatar.

Q. I want to upload my author’s images, host them on my web server and not use Gravatars; how do I do this?
A. WP Biographia uses the get_avatar pluggable function to output the author’s avatar image. Theoretically, any plugin that supports locally hosted avatar images and which overrides the default WordPress implementation of get_avatar should be able to be used. In practice, whether this approach will work for you or not depends on the combination of the theme you’re using and the interactions that the other plugins that you’re using has with the WordPress core and with your theme. The Simple Local Avatars plugin plugs get_avatar and cooperates nicely with WP Biographia, at least in my local testing environment; your mileage may vary.

Q. I’ve configured WP Biographia to show my website/Twitter/Facebook/etc links but I don’t see them in the Biography Box; where do I define these links?
A. WP Biographia adds a number of social media and web link fields to your WordPress user profile; from the Dashboard, navigate to Users / Your Profile and enter the links you want displayed to the fields in the Contact Info section.

Q. I’ve installed and configured WP Biographia and now I see not one but two differing Biography Boxes; what’s going on?
A. There’s probably one of two things going on here. Firstly, you’ve already got another plugin that makes a Biography Box installed and active and this plugin, as well as WP Biographia, are doing their job properly. Secondly, the theme you’re using hard codes a Biography Box into the theme templates. Both the TwentyTen and TwentyEleven themes supplied as part of a standard WordPress install do this.

Q. I only want to show the Biography Box for certain users and not for others; can I do this?
A. As of v2.1, WP Biographia allows you to suppress the Biography Box being displayed on a per user basis. You can suppress for posts only, for pages only or for both posts and pages. There’s two ways of configuring this. If your user has the manage_options capability, you can choose the degree of suppression, if any, from your user profile or for any other user’s profile; from the Dashboard, navigate to Users and check the Suppress From Posts and/or Suppress From Pages checkbox options. You can also configure this easily from the plugin’s Settings And Options; from the Dashboard, navigate to the Settings / WP Biographia page, click on the Exclusions tab and under User Suppression Settings, add and/or remove the users to fit your model of who should have the Biography Box displayed.

Q. I want to show the Biography Box for all users but only for certain categories; can I do this?
A. From the Dashboard, navigate to the Settings / WP Biographia page, click on the Exclusions tab and under Category Exclusion Settings, add and/or remove the categories to fit your model of when the Biography Box should be displayed.

Q. How do I add HTML to the Biographical Info section of a user’s profile?
A. In previous releases of the plugin, I’ve recommended that you add this code to your theme’s functions.php file:

remove_filter('pre_user_description', 'wp_filter_kses');

But as WebEndev helpfully pointed out on the WordPress forums, this allows all HTML to be added to the Biography Info section of a user’s profile, which may be going too far. The following code, in your theme’s functions.php, will allow line breaks to be honoured but filter out any HTML tags and attributes which are not allowed by the $allowedposttags WordPress global.

remove_filter('pre_user_description', 'wp_filter_kses');
add_filter('pre_user_description', 'wp_filter_post_kses');
add_filter('pre_user_description', 'wptexturize');
add_filter('pre_user_description', 'wpautop');
add_filter('pre_user_description', 'convert_chars');
add_filter('pre_user_description', 'balanceTags', 50);

This may be a configurable setting in a future version of the plugin to avoid the need to hack your theme’s functions.php file.

Q. How do I remove the bio on pages using page templates?
A. Add this code to your theme’s functions.php file:

add_action ('wp_head', 'remove_author_box_page_template');

function remove_author_box_page_template() {
  if (is_page_template ('page_blog.php'))
        add_filter ('wp_biographia_pattern' , 'content_only_pattern');
}

function content_only_pattern($pattern) {
    return '%1s';
}

This may be a configurable setting in a future version of the plugin to avoid the need to hack your theme’s functions.php file.

Q. I want to use my own icon set for my author’s contact links; how do I do this?
A. Firstly select the icon set you want to use. You’ll need to ensure that the icon files are in .png format and are named to match the icon set that WP Biographia ships with; take a look in wp-biographia/images to see the naming convention. Upload your icon set to your web server and note the URL (not the local path) to where your icons will live. Navigate to Settings / WP Biographia and click on the Content tab, ensure that the Use Alternate Icon Set option is checked and the URL to your alternate icons is specified in the Alternate Icon Set URL text box. By default, WP Biographia sizes the contact link icons at 32×32 pixels; you can override this in your local CSS file by redefining the .wp-biographia-item-icon CSS class (see wp-biographia/css/wp-biographia.css).

You can also override the icon file name and source URL on a per contact link basis via the $icon_url_dir parameter via the wp_biographia_link_items filter.

So to recap, the plugin uses its own default set of icons, followed by the Alternate Icon Set URL to allow you to point to an entire alternate set of icons, if the supplied ones aren’t to your liking, followed by link specific overrides via the wp_biographia_link_items filter. The order of precedence looks something like …

the plugin’s icon set – for all icons – typically this is /wp-content/plugins/wp-biographia/images.
the alternate icon set – for all icons (even added via the filter, if no override takes place on $icon_url_dir)
an override of the icon set URL for the single contact method you’re adding via wp_biographia_link_items (assuming it’s also added via wp_biographia_contact_info)

See the Filter Support And Usage section for more information on the plugin’s filters.

Q. I want to change the CSS used to format the Biography Box; how do I do this?
A. The HTML and CSS classes that the plugin emits follows a consistent structure and naming convention. See Hacking WP Biographia’s Appearance With CSS for more information.

Q. WP Biographia doesn’t support social network FOO; can you add this to the next version?
A. Yes. But also no. One of the wonderful things about today’s web is the vast amount of ways we have to interact with each other. I can’t keep up. No, really. In practical terms, this would mean that the plugin’s settings and options panels would soon get out of hand, plus the overhead of adding, testing and releasing a new version of the plugin would get out of hand before the settings and options do. But … see the next FAQ for the answer.

Q. WP Biographia doesn’t support social network or contact method BAR; how can I add this?
A. With the cunning use of the filters that WP Biographia supports, you can add support for as many social networks and/or contact methods as you like. You’ll need to do two things for each link you want to add to the plugin.

In your theme’s functions.php add support for the new link to the author’s profile by way of the wp_biographia_contact_info filter.
Still in your theme’s functions.php add support for the new link to be displayed, with an icon if you wish, via the wp_biographia_link_items filter.

See the Filter Support And Usage section for a working example of these two filters to add support for a new contact link.

Q. WP Biographia isn’t available in my language; can I submit a translation?
A. WordPress and this plugin use the gettext tools to support internationalisation. The source file containing each string that needs to be translated ships with the plugin in wp-biographia/lang/src/wp-biographia.po. See the I18n for WordPress Developers page for more information or get in touch for help and hand-holding.

Q. This plugin looks very much like the WP About Author; what’s the connection?
A. WP Biographia is inspired by and based on the WP About Author plugin by Jon Bishop. Thanks and kudos must go to Jon for writing a well structured, working WordPress plugin released under a software license that enables other plugins such as this one to be written or derived in the first place. Jon’s written other WordPress plugins as well; you should take a look.

Q. I want to amend/hack/augment this plugin; can I do the same?
A. Totally; like the original plugin by Jon, this plugin is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPLV2). See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt for the full license terms.

Q. Where does the name WP Biographia come from?
A. WP Biographia is named after the etymology of the modern English word biography. The word first appeared in the 1680s, probably from the latin biographia which itself derived from the Greek bio, meaning “life” and graphia, meaning “record” or “account” which derived from graphein, “to write”.

Changelog

3.1

Released 2012.05.03
Added: Support for shortcode role attribute to further filter display of users when the shortcode is used in wildcard mode.
Added: The Colophon tab in the admin settings screen now displays a dump of the plugin’s setting and options without the need to extract that information from the database via MySQL or phpMyAdmin.
Added: New Admin tab in the admin settings screen. This allows a suitably permissioned administrator to hide the Biography Box settings from a user’s profile according to the user’s role and to automatically suppress display of the Biography Box for newly created users according to that user’s role.
Added: Introductory help text to each post-box in each tab in the admin settings screen.
Added: The filter priorities for both the_content and the_excerpt can now be individually defined to cope with priority clashes with other themes and plugins which use these filters.
Fixed: Bug where the wp_biographia_category_exclusions setting was not defined in the database upon plugin upgrade, causing an undefined index notice message when the PHP error reporting level is set to E_NOTICE.
Fixed: Bug in settings initialisation; post_exclusions, global_post_exclusions and page_exclusions are now pre-defined and initialised correctly on both install and upgrade.

3.0.1

Released 2012.04.20
Fixed: Bug in plugin initialisation that incorrectly named the Vimeo content display option.
Fixed: Bug that caused a post’s author not to be refreshed in the front page and archive pages.
Fixed: Bug that caused a post’s author to be determined as the author of the enclosing page where a custom Loop is being used.

3.0

Released 2012.04.11
Summary: A substantial rewrite of the plugin’s structure with a reworked tabbed admin interface and substantial customisation options via the WordPress filter mechanism.
Added: Filter wp_biographia_default_settings
Added: Filter wp_biographia_contact_info
Added: Filter wp_biographia_link_items
Added: Filter wp_biographia_pre
Added: Filter wp_biographia_shortcode
Added: Filter wp_biographia_links
Added: Filter wp_biographia_feed
Added: Filter wp_biographia_biography_box
Added: Support for the enclosing form of the wp_biographia shortcode in addition to the self-closing form.
Added: Support for resetting the plugin’s settings/options to their initial default values from within the admin screen.
Added: Support for suppressing display of the Biography Box from posts, archives and the front page by category.
Added: Tabbed settings/options in the admin screen.
Fixed: Bug that caused an empty contact link to be displayed when an author’s profile has an empty corresponding contact field.
Fixed: CSS bug that prevented WP Touch from working in non-restricted mode.
Fixed: Bug that caused extended contact links in an author’s profile to be persisted after plugin uninstallation.

2.4.4

Released 2012.02.22
Fixed bug where Vimeo contact link setting was not persisted across settings changes.
Fix bug where “More Posts” link linked to the current page URL.
Minor CSS tweak.

2.4.3

Released 2012.02.17
Fixed bug where page exclusion settings were not persisted to the back-end database configuration settings.

2.4.2

Released 2012.02.16
Correct version number in plugin header.

2.4.1

Released 2012.02.16
Fixed regression bug in v2.4 where a contact link items displayed as an empty link if enabled in WP Biographia but if the corresponding link in the user’s profile was empty.
Fixed regression bug in v2.4 where the user profile Biography Box settings text was not properly displayed.
Tweak v2.4 CSS to clear up styling issues and to align list item styling with best practice.

2.4

Released 2012.02.16
Add internationalisation support; add Spanish and Turkish language files.
Add configuration setting to control the author’s name in the Biography Box as a link to “More Posts By This Author”.
Add support for displaying the author’s contact links as icons as well as plain text links.
Add support for using an alternate link icon set.

2.3

Released 2012.01.26
Suppress display of “More Posts” link in the Biography Box (if configured) if the user/author has no posts.
Add author, prefix and name short code attribute support.
Add support for global (across single, archive and front page templates) post exclusions in built-in post types and custom post types.
Tightened wording in admin screen around post exclusions.

2.2

Released 2012.01.17
Add enhanced short code support (raw and configured modes)
Add support for displaying the Biography Box on archive pages that use excerpts
Enhance contact information and Biography Box links to support Delicious, Flickr, Picasa, Vimeo, YouTube and Reddit
Fixed bug that caused the Biography Box to be displayed for every page of a multiple page post
Fixed bugs in avatar image size handling; non-default avatar image size was not persisted across settings changes; avatar image container div was not resized to new non-default avatar image size
Migrate use of wp_print_styles to wp_enqueue_scripts; see (http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/use-wp_enqueue_scripts-not-wp_print_styles-to-enqueue-scripts-and-styles-for-the-frontend/)
Made terminology and control ordering for custom post types consistent in admin pages

2.1.1

Released 2011.12.21
Fixed bug in per user suppression due to debug code being left in the release

2.1

Released 2011.12.20
Add ability to suppress the Biography Box from being displayed on posts, on pages and on posts and pages on a per user basis
Add settings link to Settings / WP Biographia admin page from the plugin’s entry on the Dashboard / Plugins page
Add checks for avatar display in the Biography Box being requested with avatar support not enabled in the Settings / Discussions admin page
Add Help & Support sidebar box to Settings / WP Biographia admin page
Handle upgrades to configuration settings gracefully; fixed bug that didn’t persist unused/unchanged configuration settings
Cleaned up the wording for the Settings / WP Biographia admin page and made terminology consistent across all configurable options
Tweaked admin CSS to introduce padding between the settings container and sidebar container that changed in WordPress 3.3

2.0

Released 2011.11.18
Added the ability to set image size
Added a simple shortcode
Added Custom Post Types support with the ability to exclude based on post IDs
Added ability to set the bio at the top or the bottom
Added a filter to short circuit for further customization
Added ability to include the post author’s email link
Refactored plugin file locations in line with WordPress plugin development recommendations
Fixed CSS issue for gravatar