vicchi

A well designed WordPress theme should be able to support all of this; the stock WordPress Twenty series certainly do, your mileage may vary according to your theme though.

1. The authors page (https://blog.brinkoffreedom.net/authors/) to display all of the authors bio’s in a list on that page.

Create a page which either uses the plugin’s shortcode or one of the plugin’s template tags to do this. You can either use these in wildcard mode, to list all authors, or you can specify categories (roles) of authors or simply repeat the shortcode/tag, once per desired author.

2. When a reader click on the authors name I am hoping I can have it load the authors bio on top and then all of the articles that author has written below it.

The author’s name link in the Biography Box automagically links to that author’s archive page (assuming it’s enabled in the plugin’s configuration settings). As I mentioned in my earlier reply, you can modify your themes author archive template to add the Biography Box (again, via shortcode or template tag) to support this.

-Gary

So I’ve just taken a look at that page (thanks for posting back so quickly). There’s no output from WP Biographia at all on that page. I can only assume that either another plugin or your theme is doing something that’s masking your authors page.

Disabling all other plugins and then re-enabling one by one to try and narrow down what’s happening is a good idea and is pretty much standard troubleshooting for diagnosing theme and/or plugin hassles.

Also try reverting to a stock WordPress theme (one of the Twenty series) and see if this recurs; this is another standard troubleshooting method.

-Gary

I don’t quite follow you … assuming you’ve enabled the Author’s Name Link in the plugin’s Content tab, the author’s name in the Biography Box title is populated by the get_author_posts_url WordPress API call, which provides the URL of the author’s archive page. From my reading of your first paragraph …

When I click the authors name in the bio box it pulls up posts by that author. How do I change this to pull up a specific page that also has posts by that author?

… you’ve just described this and the author archive page in two different ways. So I think I must be mis-reading something. Could you try and rephrase this perhaps?

The other option would be to have it pull up a single page that shows the authors bio and below that the articles he/she has written. How do I do that?

This also describes the author archive page. It’s entirely possible to edit the author template file and use either the plugin’s shortcode or one of the plugin’s template tags to insert the Biography Box at the head of the page and also to configure the plugin not to append the Biography Box to each post for archive pages of this type.

Hope this helps

-Gary

Hmm .. that shouldn’t be happening. There may be some URL redirection from another plugin or from your theme. Can you post a publicly accessible URL so I can take a look at the pages source?

-Gary

You’ve got two main choices … the first is to edit your theme’s functions.php file and place the code just before the closing ?> PHP tag. But editing your theme’s files isn’t ideal; your changes may be lost when a theme upgrade arrives.

The second (and most preferable) choice is to use another plugin to manage customisations such as this outside of your /wp-content directory, which has the advantage of making your changes theme and plugin independent. There’s several plugins to do this; I use WP Customiser, which manages script (PHP), CSS and Javascript customisations, but it’s worth pointing out, for the sake of transparency, that the reason I use this plugin is that I wrote it!.

-Gary

Hi … it looks like your theme is pulling both the excerpt and the main content of each post and so the plugin is appending the Biography Box to both of these, hence you’re seeing two instances of the Biography Box and not one.

Depending on your perspective, this is either as designed or a design flaw. I had the former in mind when I wrote the plugin originally, but there are a lot more themes out there now that use excerpts. You’ll be able to adjust this from the plugin’s configuration settings in the next release but for now there’s two things you can try.

Firstly, and hopefully preferably, you can remove the plugin’s the_excerpt filter, with the following code (caveat: I’m on family vacation right now and can’t actually try this out, but it should, in theory, work).

remove_action('the_excerpt', array(WP_Biographia::get_instance(), 'insert'));

If that doesn’t work, let me know and we’ll look at the second option, which is a bit more hacky.

-Gary

It looks like your install is running the WordPress wpautop filter after the Biography Box has been produced and it’s this that is wrapping the link separator in paragraph tags.

Try setting the Synchronise Automatic Paragraph Formatting For Content check-box in the plugin’s Admin tab; this should prevent this from happening in 90% of cases. If it doesn’t I’ll need to look at how your theme (and other plugins) are working in a bit more detail, but try this first.

-Gary

Hi … there’s no plans to add native support for phone/fax numbers (or any other form of social or contact link) to the plugin. However, this is something that you can easily set up for your site via the plugin’s filters. See the plugin’s FAQ, specifically FAQ 14 and FAQ 15.

There’s full code examples for how to add a custom contact link via the plugin’s wp_biographia_contact_info and wp_biographia_link_items filters in the plugin’s Filter documentation.

Hope this helps

-Gary

Sounds like there might be a plugin interfering with the link generation or possibly your theme.

To try and work out where the problem lies, I’d recommend disabling all other plugins and reverting to one of the stock WordPress themes, then check whether the problem recurs. If it doesn’t (and hopefully it won’t), then re-enable your plugins, one by one, re-testing after each plugin gets re-enabled.

-Gary

So this is very odd.

I’ve done some research and while WordPress does support login names with spaces in them, general consensus on the forums is that this isn’t a good idea. Although the WordPress core does the right thing, there’s no guarantee that themes or plugins don’t make assumption about login names.

But having said that, I’ve done some testing and can’t seem to replicate this. What I’ve done is, in addition to my account which is gary, I’ve created two accounts, both with spaces and with differences in case, so there’s Upper Case and lower case (not the most imaginative of names I know).

On a locally hosted WordPress install (localhost:8888) I’ve created test posts for both these new accounts, disabled all plugins (except WP Biographia) and used a stock WordPress theme (TwentyTen in this case).

I’ve also created a Contributors page, with the following shortcodes …

[wp_biographia user="gary"]

[wp_biographia user="Upper Case"]

[wp_biographia user="lower case"]

For each post, the theme uses the WordPress get_author_posts_url API call. This API call builds a URL to the author’s archive page in the form of [host[:port]][prefix][/author][/user]. So for my gary account, the URL is https://localhost:8888/author/gary/. But the API call also detects login names with spaces in them and replaces the spaces with the - character and lower cases the remainder of the login name, so for the Upper Case user the URL is https://localhost:8888/author/upper-case/ and for the lower case user the URL is https://localhost:8888/author/lower-case/.

This all works as it should and the author archives for all the users, when accessed via the theme’s links, display correctly. As does my mocked up Contributors page.

WP Biographia uses the same API call and thus, this also works.

So there’s something on your site, either in your WordPress setup, in your theme or in a plugin which isn’t working correctly. Interestingly enough, although https://mudandadventure.com/author/Paul%20Buijs/ generates a 404 error, if I manually fix up the URL to what WordPress should support, as in https://mudandadventure.com/author/paul-buijs/, this also 404s, which isn’t what I’d expect.

From this, I don’t think there’s an issue with WP Biographia’s handling of login names with spaces in them. At least, I’ve been unable to replicate this using the current released version of the plugin. So I think the answer may lie elsewhere.

What I’d suggest is that you firstly revert to a stock WordPress theme, any of the Twenty series should be fine and disable all plugins. Check the author archive links that this theme generates. Do they look as they should (all lower case and - separated) as I’ve described above?

If this works, then re-enable WP Biographia and re-test. What happens?

If this works, re-enable each plugin you have and re-test after you’ve enabled each plugin. What happens?

Finally, revert to your custom theme and again, re-test.

I appreciate that this is a laborious process, but it’s the best (and probably only) way to narrow down the source of the problem.

-Gary

I think the problem may be either that you’re using your Display Name for the shortcode’s user attribute, rather than your login name (see the shortcode’s documentation at https://www.vicchi.org/codeage/wp-biographia/4-shortcode-usage-and-support/) or that your login name has spaces in it, which sometimes throws a theme’s permalink redirects into confusion.

If your login name is different from your display name, trying using that in the shortcode, along the lines of [wp_biographia user="login-name"].

-Gary

The call to the shortcode is invalid as the author parameter has to take an argument, which is a user’s login name, so by specifying the shortcode as [wp_biographia user], the user parameter is effectively ignored.

Try replacing your current code, which reads …

<?php echo do_shortcode('[wp_biographia author]'); ?>

… with …

<?php
	if (isset($curauth) && !empty($curauth)) {
		echo do_shortcode('[wp_biographia user="' . $curauth->user_login . '"]');
	}
?>

You should actually be using one of the plugin’s template tags here, but testing this has thrown up a bug, so this should do the job until the next version of the plugin.

-Gary

Really? That doesn’t make a lot of sense. If that was the case, I’d expect to see multiple Biography Boxes on the author archive page, one per post. It might help if I can see the code of that page template? What theme are you using and the author archive template been customised at all?

-Gary

So I’ve just taken a look at this and the short answer to your question is it depends on how you’re producing the Biography Box.

I’m assuming you’re either using one of the plugin’s template tags or the plugin’s shortcode, embedded within the author archive template?

Once I know how you’re doing things, I should be able to recommend a solution based on your current implementation. Hopefully!

-Gary

Glad to be of help and happy it’s got solved for you.

-Gary