- Latest News
- Overview
- Description
- Download WP Biographia
- Installation
- Screenshots
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Shortcode Support And Usage
- Filter Support And Usage
- What’s Changed?
Latest News
Updated 10/05/12; WP Biographia v3.1.0 is now available on the WordPress plugin repository and on GitHub.
Overview
WP Biographia is a WordPress plugin to add and display a customizable author biography for all single post types, in RSS feeds, on pages, in archives and on each entry on the landing page.
- Description
- Installation
- Screenshots
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Shortcode Support And Usage
- Filter Support And Usage
- Download WP Biographia
- What’s Changed?
Description
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 color 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 WP Biographia
You can download the latest version of WP Biographia from the following sources.
- From the plugin’s github page at https://github.com/vicchi/wp-biographia
- From the official WordPress plugin repository
hi – really love the plugin Gary – just need to fine tune my use of it though
I’m finding that the contact info for each user isn’t being displayed – i’ve selected show authors bio (works great) but for email, website, twitter and fb links (the ones i want the plugin ‘ display) although in the wp settings for wp biographia ive sedlected ‘show’ they aren’t showing … maybe im doing something wrong? thanks! Rory
its working in the home page listing all posts – nice beige background colour etc but when i go into the post its self the contact info isnt displayed – can this be changed? thanks, Rory
actually Gary – its only working in the section when you select ‘see all posts by rory’ – on the home page the author box isnt displayed which is fine but id love it to appear at the end of each post in the same way it appears when you view all posts by the author from the author box …. beige with all contact info shown …. thanks
so sorry Gary! i spotted my user for some reason was in the suppressed box for the post – ive unsuppressed it so all is good – sorry for all the postings here – i really like the plugin! happy to tell others too – though it might be good to tell people a little more clearly that they actually need to get an additional plugin to add their own pic instead of the avatar – thank you again!!
A quick question on plugins for author images vs. avatars.
I think this is pretty well described in FAQs number 4 and 5 on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-biographia/faq/ … or is this not what you mean?
-Gary
Hi Rory,
The contact details need to be added to your user profile; from the Dashboard, navigate to Users -> Your Profile and then add the links to the fields in the Contact Info sub-section. I’m not quite sure what you mean from your other comments, could you provide some URLs or screenshots. Ping me by email if that’s easier; my contact details are over at http://www.garygale.com/
-Gary
hi Gary,
one further question …
how can i get rid of the second about rory box – the one in a light grey background – see this link:
http://celtdigital.com/social-business-emotional-engagement/#more-283
it turns up at the end after the beige box in each post and at the top of the ‘see other posts’ section
sorry for not being so sharp!
thanks,
Rory
Hi Rory,
Looks like you’re using the TwentyEleven theme; this has its own, less functional “about box” baked into the theme templates. You’d need to remove this, preferably by creating a child theme (as I’ve done on this site) so you don’t have your changes impacted by a future theme update.
-Gary
Love the Plugin Gary! Using it at my site – groovyPost.com
Keep up the good work and thank you!
I am using this and love it!
I have the authors listed all on a page too here: http://www.stavangerexpats.com/about/contributors I am having trouble with one thing on that.
Some of my authors have a . or a – in their username. It seems that this makes them not show up in my list (linked above) all – but the author box still shows on their articles. Is there a simple way on my end to fix this?
Hi Fonda,
Thanks for the great feedback. I assume that to produce your contributors page you’re using the
wp_biographiashortcode with the name attribute in wildcard mode, as inwp_biographia author="*"… ?I haven’t seen any issues with this, but then again, I don’t think I’ve ever tested with usernames with non-alpha characters in them.
What would be really helpful is if you can let me have some examples of the usernames which don’t show up on your contributors page, together with the settings and version of the plugin as well as the WordPress version you’re using.
This way I can see if I can duplicate this.
-Gary
I am using version Version 2.4.4 of the plugin and Version 3.3.1 of wordpress.
Here are 2 example of authors that dont work:
[wp_biographia author="ms-sunshine"] – username Ms. Sunshine
[wp_biographia author="ruth-williams"] – username Ruth Williams
Here are 2 examples that do work, and are live on the page:
[wp_biographia author="k_stricklan"] – username k_stricklan
[wp_biographia author="sadieramm"] -username sadieramm
Just to be 100% clear on this, for each of these user’s profiles the username is
ms-sunshineandruth-williams… ? (Ms. Sunshine isn’t a valid WordPress username as far as I’m aware)And is “Ms. Sunshine” set as the user’s Nickname or combination of First and Last Name fields in the profile?
Which display option in WP Biographia are you using to output the user’s name in the Biography Box? First/Last, Account, Nickname or Display Name?
-Gary
Correct on the usernames.
me. sunshine is set as the username and nickname. Her actual name is their too.
I did not think either that there could be a period or dash in a username.. but somehow it is – I have a few users with them.
As for ms. sunshine. Here is a post where you can see her author box if that helps: http://www.stavangerexpats.com/what-to-do-before-you-move-to-stavanger Her box shoes up at the end of the post with no problems.
I have it the ‘box settings’
Author’s Name
- First/Last Name
Hmm. OK. Leave it with me and I’ll try and duplicate this and see what’s going on here.
-Gary
So I can’t seem to duplicate this in v2.4.4 of the plugin. I’ve created user accounts with dashes and periods in their name and they display fine when using the shortcode with
author="*". So I’m wondering if these users are suppressed for any reason. Have you ensured that they are not in the list of Suppressed Users for pages under Per User Suppression Of The Biography Box On Pages or that Don’t show the Biography Box on your pages is checked under the user’s profile entry in Dashboard -> Users -> All Users -> (username) -> Edit … ?-Gary
Strange. They are not suppressed, and neither have the ‘dont show’ box checked.
Guess I just need to have them make new accounts without spaces or punctuations.
Let’s not get you to create new accounts just yet. I’d like to get to the bottom of this. Drop me an email and I’ll send you some code you can (temporarily) put on your web server to try and see what’s going on here.
-Gary
Hi Gary,
What a GREAT plugin!
I have installed it at my site. Works fine under posts but it’s not showing up at the top of archive pages.
I use the Genesis Framework.
http://www.synaptici.com/2012/new-directions-at-synaptic-i/ (post works)
http://www.synaptici.com/author/gilnamur/ (archive does not)
Any ideas on why the archive is not showing? I do have it set to “Display In Post Archives”
I am in the midst of re-working this site as I will be adding guest authors.
BUT
Where I really want to use this is over at http://lifeasahuman.com/
We have over 100 authors (2000+ articles) and I want to re-work our authors boxes.
Also, one suggestion. If I select “Open Contact Links In A New Tab Or Window” it also opens the ‘More Posts’ link in a new window. Suggest this should open in same
I’ll be styling this in CSS a bit later.
Again, GREAT plugin and VERY well documented!
Look for a contributions soon
Cheers,
Gil
Hi Gil,
Without seeing how your theme works it’s a bit difficult to say, but I suspect it’s because the “Display In Post Archives” settings appends the biography box to each post, not to the top of the page itself. It can be done though, but needs a bit of PHP coding to get the author name of the (author) archive page and then use the do_shortcode API call to call the shortcode itself. This is what I’ve done elsewhere on this site … http://www.vicchi.org/author/gary/.
As to the “open links in a new tab or window”. This is one of those “you can’t please everyone” settings. I put this in as a feature as it was requested, but it’s not my favourite (I prefer controlling where I open links on a per link basis rather than having the site dictate it but this got a lot of requests so I added it).
-Gary
Hi Gary,
Here is my solution for Genesis Framework users to show the profile on author archive pages
Load and activate the Genesis Simple Hooks plugin
Go to dashboard/genesis/simple hooks
Find the ” genesis_before_loop Hook ”
Enter this code:
[wp_biographia]
Check off “Execute Shortcodes on this hook?”
Check off “Execute PHP on this hook? ”
Save Changes.
That’s it!
Cheers,
Gil
hmmm my php did not show up?
I’d make one change there … rather than putting the shortcode in directly, I’d add it as a call to do_shortcode as you never know when that part of the content might end up inside another shortcode, and shortcodes inside shortcodes don’t get processed and expanded by WordPress’s default shortcode processor.
-Gary
Hi Gary,
I sent you an email on this as I did have it PHP but when I entered the comment above, the code did not show up.
Cheers,
Gil
Hi Gary,
Thanks for the quick reply! Totally understand the “More Posts” thing.
Genesis allows profiles to be shown above the archives. If I turn it on it shows the regular profile and not yours. I will dig into the PHP, solve it and then beam back and leave a how it’s done in Genesis if you like.
Also, as to HTML in Bios, I have been using the ‘Weasel’s HTML Bios’ plugin by Andy Moore for a few years now over at Life As A Human and it’s worked very well for us
I will do a write up on your plugin soon and link here as you suggest in your http://www.vicchi.org/codeage/donate/ page.
Again, THANK YOU for a great plugin! Well done!
Cheers,
Gil
Hi Gary,
I found a small thing (glitch/bug).
I have the biographia settings to not show profiles on pages. It works BUT if there happens to be a shortcode on the page, the bio will show.
Peek at http://www.synaptici.com/about/contact/
The same was happening on my subscribe page. I can stop it by using the exclusions feature but thought you might want to know about it so I left the contact page this way so you can see it.
I have a solution to show the profile in archives the Genesis framework. I will post that soon.
Cheers,
Gil
I assume by “a shortcode” you mean the WP Biographia shortcode? If that’s the case this is not a glitch, it’s as designed. As the docs say, the default mode for the shortcode is “raw”, in other words, “you’ve asked for it, you’ve got it”. If you want the shortcode to obey the plugin’s configuration settings you’ll need to use the shortcode in “configured” mode.
-Gary
Hi Garry,
No I didnt mean your shortcode. The contact page uses a short code from from a forms plugin and subscribe pages uses a shortcode from a subscribe plugin.
Cheers,
Gil
Oh. OK. That’s odd. Not entirely sure I’ve got the full picture here. Drop me a mail with some more details please? That was I can look into this and (try and) figure out what’s going on here.
-Gary
PS: It’s Gary with one “r”
Gary,
Confirmed the same problem: I invoked
[wp_biographia mode="configured" user="username"] in a category description. That triggers the biographia box to appear for all posts listed, despite my settings… anything you want me to send you or try?
Or, can we invoke a box from a template file directly?
Chris
Chris – can you send me (via email) your current settings for the plugin? If you’re running v3.1 of the plugin this information is under the Colophon tab in the plugin’s admin screens. If you’re running v3.0.1 or earlier, you’ll need to dig around in the database (see here for how to do this).
-Gary
Hi Gary,
Will do! Sorry about the 2 R’s!
Cheers,
Gil
Pingback: [»] Wyświetlanie podpisu autora we wpisach - wtyczka WP Biographia
Hi Gary,
Thanks for the time and effort put into this plugin. I’ve installed it on a new site where I expect to have numerous authors. I’d like to style the box on the Authors or Contributors page differently than it is styled on posts. (Thus, I don’t want to replace the existing CSS file that ships with WP-Biographia.)
So, if I create a custom CSS file just for the boxes on the Authors Page, how do I actually apply it? Or, how can I apply CSS inline to individual author’s boxes? I did read your instructions about filters and the function file but can figure out how to make CSS magic happen on an individual basis.
Thanks for your help.
Hi Vernessa,
Thanks for the kind words. There’s two things you’ll need to do. Firstly you’ll need to break apart the CSS that WP Biographia applies to all instances of the Biography Box by default. The first part of this post should help you do this. This should allow you to identity the CSS classes and IDs that you want to re-style.
Once you have the CSS to your liking, you’ll need to get it loaded and applied to the Biography Box but only for archive pages which are conditionally tagged as Author Pages. The last part of the post I linked to above tells you how to load your custom CSS, but you’ll also need to ensure you wrap the call to
add_actionin theis_authorconditional tag.Whether you do this in the author template in your theme or in your theme’s
functions.phpis up to you. You might have to experiment a bit to see which approach works best, dependent on the structure and layout of your theme.If you have any problems getting this to work, ping me an email, my contact details are over at http://www.garygale.com/.
-Gary
Hi Gary,
Thank you for the direction. I’ll give this a go. (Above, I meant to say “but can’t figure out” so I’m glad you knew I didn’t know how to proceed!)
Technology and geography must go hand-in-hand as those are my first loves, too! Reading a map is as enjoyable as reading a book.
Much obliged that you take time from your hectic (and illustrious) doings to give us a hand.
Let me know how you get on … (and you’re right, I did guess it was can’t rather than can!)
-Gary
Gary,
New users (subscribers) are added as enabled users one the exclusions plugin settings page, and all users have the WP-biographia options enabled on their user profiles.
Is there a way to auto-suppress new users? Is there a way to hide the WP-biographia options on the user profile by access level?
Hi Chris,
The short answers are “yes, that’s how the plugin (currently) works” and “no, this isn’t (currently) supported“.
But this is probably not helpful. I think there’s actually two questions and/or feature requests here, if I’m reading you correctly.
One is to have a (global) option to automatically place new users (maybe regardless of their role) into the exclusion list.
The other is to have a (global) option that says something along the lines of “only show the WP Biographia options in a user’s profile if the user has capability X or greater“.
For roles and capabilities I’m talking about the standard ones that WordPress supports.
Does that sound about right?
-Gary
That sounds spot on.
So I’ve been looking into this in a bit more detail.
… this is relatively easy to implement, both as a global option and/or as one where you can specify the roles of users who should be automagically excluded.
… this is a little bit more … gnarly. In a stock WordPress install, there’s a set correspondence between a role and the capabilities this role has. There’s also plugins which allow capabilities to be (re)assigned to roles, as well as to define new capabilities.
I think a case of simpler is better is probably a good idea here and to change this second “requirement” into …
“only show the WP Biographia options in a user’s profile if the user has role X or greater“.
Would this still work for what you had in mind?
-Gary
Assuming this does still work for what you had in mind, then I’ve put changes to support both these use cases into the plugin. It’ll be out in v3.1 which should be release in the next couple of weeks.
-Gary
Thanks Gary. Works great!
Wow, great plugin. I like it. Thanks for creating it.
But is there anyway to display more then one website in my profile? I want to display like this:
email | website 1 | website 2 | website 3 and so on | twitter | facebook …
Thanks.
Absolutely. Take a look at FAQs 13 and 14. A social media contact link doesn’t have to be to a social media site, it can be anything that can be referenced by a URL, including other websites.
-Gary
hi. tnx for this plugin.
i want add my googleplus url rel=author to show that I’m writer!
for example: https://plus.google.com/1212mygplusnumber56464?rel=author
but author remove !
please help.
Hi. I’ve just tested this out with v3.1 of the plugin (the latest version, released today) and if I update my Google+ URL in my user profile (Dashboard -> Users -> Your Profile) and save this, providing I have configured WP Biographia to actually display Google+ as one of the supported contact links, then the
?rel=authoris passed through to the plugin correctly and shown in the Biography Box link for Google+. I’m assuming that this is what you meant by but author remove(d)?-Gary
Yes, exactly!
Odd. I can’t reproduce it. Take a look at this post and let me know all of the settings and information the post details. I’ll take a look and see if there’s anything obvious or whether this might be a bug and will need a closer look.
-Gary