WP Biographia v3.2 got pushed to the WordPress plugin repository this afternoon. In the grand scheme of things it's not a massive release but it goes a long way to solving some of the most frequently asked questions that arrive in my Inbox and via the plugin's support forums.

As I've mentioned a few times in the past, it's nigh on impossible to test a WordPress plugin against the myriad combinations of themes and plugins that exist in the WordPress ecosystem. Especially where CSS is concerned, plugins and themes frequently don't play well together and bleed over from another theme or plugin's CSS often makes WP Biographia's formatting look ... interesting. This tends to happen in two places. Firstly in the formatting of the contact links in the Biography Box and secondly in the positioning of the user's avatar image.

Wp Biographia v3.2 provides two workarounds for this. The plugin's CSS now uses the !important CSS specifier to ensure the CSS is applied as it should be in as many cases as is possible.

But sometimes this isn't enough to fix formatting issues, especially if the plugin's the_content filter priority has been dropped below the default value of 10, to get the Biography Box to appear in the right order with the output of other plugins. In this case, the WordPress wpautop filter, which automagically adds paragraph tags, runs after the Biography Box is produced. In this situation you can now tell the plugin to synchronise the wpautop filter to run after the Biography Box is produced.

WP Biographia has grown and matured quite a bit since it was first released. A quick glance through the multiple releases of the code that make up the plugin tells me that in v1.0, the plugin was 761 lines of PHP code and 46 lines of CSS. Now in v3.1, that's increased to 2944 lines of PHP, 92 lines of JavaScript and 174 lines of CSS.

But more importantly, as the plugin has grown and changed and more and more features have been added, so have the number of configuration settings, from 22 in v1.0 to 43 in v3.1. While most people seem to use the plugin out of the box, with little or no customisation, if you do want to take full advantage of all that the plugin has to offer, this means you need to roll up your sleeves and trawl through all of the plugin's settings, which can be a daunting task at times.

So with this in mind, assuming you've installed and activated the plugin, here's a step by step and screen by screen guide to bending WP Biographia to your will.

It's taken a while but I just did this ...

$ rsync --recursive --verbose --exclude '.git' \* ~/Projects/svn/wp-biographia/trunk/
$ svn up
$ svn stat
$ svn ci -m 'Updating with v3.0 changes from master on github'
$ svn cp trunk tags/3.0
$ svn ci -m 'Tagging v3.0'

... and after much coding, rewriting, testing and documenting, v3.0 of WP Biographia has finally made it off of the starting blocks.

WP Biographia's always had the ability to suppress the display of the plugin's Biography Box for all users; unfortunately that's been accomplished by simply not installing the plugin. But judging from requests on the WordPress forums as well as emails hitting my Inbox, suppressing the display of the Biography Box for some users ranks highest on the list of requested features.

So it's good to be able to say that as of v2.1.1 of the plugin, you can now do this and v2.1.1 is now live and able to be downloaded from GitHub as well as from within WordPress or via the WordPress plugin repository.

It's taken a while but after 20 commits on GitHub, 1000 odd lines of PHP code, 40 odd WordPress forum posts and, what to me is a staggering, 1100 odd WordPress downloads, WP Biographia finally hits version 2.0. As I've written before, this is very much an ongoing learning process and putting version 2.0 out into the wild hasn't been entirely trouble free, as this thread on the WordPress forums amply shows.

But despite the initial teething problems, version 2.0 is out and the list of enhancements and fixes remains unchanged from the beta version, but the official version 2.0 release of this plugin is now both on GitHub and the WordPress plugin repository and while my Codeage page still remains the official home for this plugin, there's a nicer looking home on GitHub for WP Biographia courtesy of GitHub's pages feature.

It's been almost a month since I released the first version of WP Biographia and in that time, according to the stats on the WordPress plugin page, it's been downloaded 212 times. That's rather gratifying. Several people have also emailed me to tell me that they're using the plugin. That's even more gratifying.

But despite its simplicity, a typical WordPress install is almost infinitely customisable and so is almost never what's supplied in the installation download. People add in plugins, widgets and themes. This blog alone has 18 active plugins and a custom theme. While the plugins, widgets and themes should all play nicely together, sometimes there's strange and unforeseen side effects; here's two that have come to light over the first month of WP Biographia in the real world and not in the safe, sand-boxed environment of my blog.

In a way, this was all Matt Whatsit's fault; he writes very profane and very funny blog posts and reading his recent The Five Stages Of P****d Wife (which you should read if you haven't already, err, read it) made me laugh, hell, it made me ROFL and LMAO at the same time but it also made me think, though not necessarily about wives or drunkenness ...

Now background reading and general swotting up on a topic is all very well but to really learn how to do something you just have to roll your sleeves up and do it yourself. Though it's probably stretching a comparison too far, you don't learn to drive a car through reading the highway code; you actually get behind the wheel (preferably under supervision) and ... drive. You don't learn about what food tastes good from a recipe book; you ... taste the stuff yourself.

And so it is with writing code and using new and unfamiliar APIs. It was definitely the case with my recent (reacquaintance of, and) foray into JavaScript and the addition of support for Nokia's Ovi Maps API to the Mapstraction project, with the added benefit of having to teach myself how to move from my (by now very dated) knowledge of version and revision control under CVS to git.