vicchi

Just updated my local test install to WP 3.7 and WP Biographia’s biography box has vanished. Yikes.

I’m running with WP_DEBUG enabled and I’m not seeing anything in the PHP error log at all … the plugin is just not working and not working silently into the bargain.

I’m looking into this today and will report back once I’ve worked out what’s going on here.

-Gary

I’m afraid this isn’t possible with the current version of the plugin and I doubt whether it will be possible with future versions.

The Foursquare API only allows a user who has explicitly authorised access to their checkins via OAuth to gain access to the list of (recent or historical checkins) (see https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/community).

Although the checkins by a user API endpoint at https://api.foursquare.com/v2/users/USER_ID/checkins allows a user id to be supplied, the only valid user id is self which is the currently authenticated user (see https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/users/checkins).

To do what you’re proposing would mean that each user who you are friends with on Foursquare would have to explicitly authorise your WordPress site via OAuth and that a Foursquare API call for each and every user would have to be made. Although not expressly forbidden by the API’s terms of use, I suspect Foursquare would not approve of this. Also, the amount of API calls that would need to be made would place a substantial delay on page load times, which isn’t something you’d want either.

So for now and probably for the foreseeable future, the Foursquare API just doesn’t support this; if this did become possible, it would need a substantial amount of coding changes to the plugin to enable this.

In summary, a great idea but not one that can be realised, for now at least.

-Gary

The plugin’s FAQs cover most of this and there’s also a more detailed write up on configuring the plugin.

Feel free to ask again if you need any more detailed information.

-Gary

Hi … You’ve not missed anything in the plugin’s setup, but this is documented in the plugin’s FAQs, specifically FAQ number 6, which says …

I’ve installed and configured WP Biographia and now I see not one but two differing Biography Boxes; what’s going on?

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.

From looking at the page source for the link you mentioned in your post, I can see that the first Biography Box on the page is produced by WP Biographia as it’s prefixed by an HTML comment that the plugin emits

<!-- WP Biographia v3.3.0 -->

The second Biography Box appears to be hard coded into your theme’s templates and is inside a div with a class of about-author.

A workaround would either be to edit your theme’s templates to remove this second div or to add some custom CSS to set display: none for the about-author class.

I can also see from the page source that you’re using the Nevia theme from ThemeForest. As this is a premium theme, there’s not much else I can do to help as I can’t get access to the theme’s template source code to look further; I’d recommend you contact ThemeForest support or the theme’s author to help you with this.

-Gary

Hi … from looking at the source of the lite version of Vantage (and with the assumption that the full premium version uses the same page templates) you won’t be able to do this without editing the page templates.

WP Biographia adds the Biography Box to post or page content within the WordPress Loop. The way that Vantage has structured the post templates is that the previous and next post links are only emitted after the Loop has completed. Or to put it another way, by the time your theme is making the links for the previous and next links, the WordPress Loop has already finished running and so WP Biographia has also finished running.

If you’re willing to edit the child version of your theme, you could create a custom single page template and use the plugin’s template tags to emit the Biography Box as part of the theme’s navigation section. If you do go down this route, you’ll need to make sure you configure the plugin not to automagically add the Biography Box to prevent duplicate Biography Boxes being emitted.

-Gary

Thinking about this in some detail, I agree that point 1. would make an excellent feature request and I’ll look at building this into the next release of the plugin.

For now though, you should be able to use the plugin’s filters, specifically the wp_biographia_link_item filter to do 99% of this …

This filter is called once for each contact link that the Biography Box contains and is passed an array containing all the elements of that contact link. So for point 1, the passed array would look something like this …

array (
  'type' => 'text',
  'format' => '<li><a href="%s" %s title="%s" class="%s">%s</a></li>',
  'url' => 'https://www.garygale.com/',
  'meta' => 'target="_self"',
  'title' => 'Gary On The Web',
  'body' => 'Web',
  'link-class' => 'wp-biographia-link-text',
)

You can rebuild the content of the link by using the format element as the input to a call to sprintf in a filter hook and trap the link type from the body element. So to change each occurence of ‘[author name] On The Web’ to ‘More about [author name]’, your filter hook would look something like this …

add_filter('wp_biographia_link_item', 'filter_link_item', 10, 2);
function filter_link_item($content, $params) {
	if ($params['body'] === 'Web') {
		$text = str_replace(__(' On The Web'), '', $params['title']);
		$title = __('More about ') . $text;
		$content = sprintf($params['format'], $params['url'], $params['meta'], $title, $params['link-class'], $params['body']);
	}

	return $content;
}

For point 2, you can repeat the process, this time trapping on $params['body'] containing the text Mail.

Hope this helps …

-Gary

@wpagentur … I’ve just gone back and revisited the URL you posted and the contact links in the Biography Box are lining up as they should do. Did you make any changes to the plugin’s settings, to your installed plugins or your theme?

@inzerillo87 … this is something to do with either your theme or with another of your plugins. It doesn’t look like a CSS issue but I can definitely see in the page source of the link you posted that the | separator is being surrounded by paragraph tags.

To narrow this down, I’d recommend the standard WordPress troubleshooting of reverting to a stock WordPress theme (one of the Twenty series) and disabling all other plugins. That should help you detect whether it’s a theme issue or a plugin issue.

-Gary

I haven’t heard back from you in over 2 months, so I’m flagging this thread as resolved. I’ll certainly consider this as a feature request.

-Gary

I haven’t heard back from you in over 2 months, so I’m assuming that either this is no longer a problem or you’ve sorted out trying to merge the plugin’s code with your theme. I’m flagging this thread as resolved. Feel free to reopen if this isn’t the case.

-Gary

Thanks for the feedback. This is a nice idea. It’s not exactly trivial as I’d need to extend both TinyMCE (the visual editor) and the HTML editor, which both use different code to work and to extend. But it’s definitely doable. I’ll look at getting this done for the next version of the plugin; just not sure when that will be though.

-Gary

Thanks; that would be helpful. I’ve got a spare domain so I’ll set up a multisite install and test on that. Are you using (sub)domains or paths for your install?

I still think that the database errors you’ve seen are unrelated to this. They look like the result of either creating or upgrading database tables and WP Biographia does neither of these (I’ve just checked the plugin’s code base to be 100% sure of this).

What I want to track down is whether the 500 error is a result of the plugin being activated in a multisite environment, whether this is a clash with another plugin (which is possible, given there’s so many plugin combinations possible) or whether this is just pure coincidence.

-Gary

One other point … it looks like there’s a Trac ticket open for these errors when upgrading multisite/network. See https://core.trac.www.ads-software.com/ticket/22134. This isn’t currently fixed, as the milestone (previously for v3.6) is now ‘Future Release’.

I’m still not convinced that this is a plugin issue, but I’d be interested to hear your answers to my earlier questions on this.

-Gary

Hi …

Although WP Biographia hasn’t been formally tested with network/multisite installs, I’ve not had any reports of problems.

A quick search for errors such as those you’ve mentioned, seems to indicate that these can be caused by upgrading between WordPress versions for network/multisite installs. Have you recently done this?

Also, is there any reason why you’ve done a manual install of the plugin and not one via the WordPress dashboard?

Have you also tried the usual troubleshooting mechanism of disabling all other plugins before enabling this one? There might be some unforeseen clash between WP Biographia and any other plugins you have installed and active.

-Gary

Agreed, this would make a nice feature request. I’ll take a look at doing this for the next release of the plugin.

-Gary

Hi … I’m afraid this isn’t supported by the plugin as the Follow button doesn’t have the same content or format as the contact links that WordPress supports and that WP Biographia adds to; these are basically just simply URL links, with optional icons.

You could, in theory, generate the HTML and Javascript code that makes up a Twitter Follow button by using the generator on Twitter’s web site (https://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons#follow) and then write some code that hooks into WP Biographia’s wp_biographia_links filter so append the button to the list of contact links. But this is in theory only; it would mean writing some PHP code and you would probably have to also add some custom CSS to make sure the styling of the button aligns with your theme.

-Gary