Our second WordPress plugin takes advantage of the new wp_editor api that was introduced in WordPress 3.3. The plugin Big Bio box adds an additional user bio box on the profile page.
The box has a full tinymce WYSIWYG editor and the user is able to format their description and life story exactly as they would if writing a full WordPress blog post or page. It’s a great little plugin that can be used on multi author WordPress web sites.
Adding html to WordPress user profile.
There’s lots of plugins and functions that you can use on the default user description box in WordPress if you want a tinymce editor or rich text formatter but they use the old way of calling the editor and can cause problems.
Give you authors the ability to upload photos and format their author description and pretty soon the description can be as long as the blog post. This can be a problem if you call the user description in an author box at the end of the post or in the sidebar with one of the author profile widgets.
Adding tinymce to author profile description.
Using big Bio box plugin can tackle that problem. Because we use a conditional filter it means that the full author bio is only displayed on the author page above their list of blog posts. If you call the user description at the end of a blog post then you will still only get the default unformatted user description.
Using the big bio box is a great way to get your blog authors to provide a full description and details of themselves and also rewards them with the ability to provide details of their own web sites or aims.
It’s pretty straightforward to install on your web site. Just download the zip file from the link below and upload it to your WordPress website. Then just activate the plugin and start enhancing your user profile.
There is one browser specific issue with the plugin at the moment which i’m working on and will update the plugin at some stage in the future. The issue relates to IE8 and the problem is that the drop down menu items on the tinymce editor do not work correctly. All the other browsers I’ve tested the plugin on work without a problem.
Use the plugin or add the user description code your theme functions file.
Not everyone likes to have lots of plugins installed and prefer to use features such as this by directly adding it to their theme functions.php file. If that’s you then just cut and paste the code below into your functions file to get this to work on your web site.
/** text format for big bio box */
add_action( 'personal_options_update', 'save_extra_user_profile_fields' );
add_action( 'edit_user_profile_update', 'save_extra_user_profile_fields' );
function save_extra_user_profile_fields( $user_id ) {
if ( !current_user_can( 'edit_user', $user_id ) ) { return false; }
update_user_meta( $user_id, 'bigbiobox', $_POST['bigbiobox'] );
}
add_action( 'show_user_profile', 'extra_user_profile_fields' );
add_action( 'edit_user_profile', 'extra_user_profile_fields' );
function extra_user_profile_fields( $user ) { ?>
<h3>Full profile description:</h3>
<table>
<th><label for="bigbiobox"><?php _e('Full profile description'); ?></label></th>
<td>
<?php
$settings = array('wpautop' => false, 'media_buttons' => true, 'quicktags' => true, 'textarea_rows' => '15' );
wp_editor(html_entity_decode(get_the_author_meta( 'bigbiobox', $user->ID ) ), 'bigbiobox', $settings); ?>
<br />
<span><?php _e('Add you life history or a lot more about you. This will show on your author profile page.'); ?></span>
</td>
</table>
<?php }
function author_bigbio() {
if (is_author($author)){
the_author_meta( 'bigbiobox' );
}
elseif (is_single()){
the_author_meta( 'user_description' );
}
}
add_filter('the_author_description', 'author_bigbio');
Hopefully this plugin will be accepted into the official WordPress repository so that you will be kept updated automatically with any changes I make in the future.
Download Big Bio Box from the official WordPress directory.
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