Gary Gale

I continue to be genuinely gobsmacked at the reception that WP Biographia has received since I first released it in August of this year. People are downloading it; people are emailing me about it; people are discussing it and asking for new features on the WordPress forums and since I put the code up on GitHub, people are even forking it, improving on it and sending me pull requests. But I've been buried deep in my day job over the last month or so and as a result coding has had to play second fiddle to what I do for a living.

But thanks to Travis Smith getting in touch with me via Twitter and taking the time to make his changes and bug fixes on a GitHub fork there's now a new beta version of WP Biographia up on GitHub for testing or for those who like to live on the bleeding edge.

In addition to Travis' changes I've also reworked the plugin structure to reflect the recommended WordPress plugin file and directory layout and this, coupled with 6 other new features and big fixes is sufficient, I think, to up the version number straight to v2.0.0. Here's what's new.

• You can now set the size of the author's Gravatar image
• The plugin now supports the [wp_biographia] shortcode
• You can now exclude the Biography Box from specific posts based on the post's ID
• You can now place the Biography Box at the top of the post as well as the bottom of the post
• You can now further customise the behaviour of the plugin through a short circuit filter
• The issues with CSS on some WordPress installations have been fixed.

Once the beta's been tested out and given the general community nod of approval I'll push the new version to the WordPress Subversion repository so people who are using the plugin and don't want to manually update the plugin or test the new version out will get the automagic update notification in their WordPress dashboard. Photo Credits: Leo Reynolds on Flickr.