1) Now I have an author bio on my homepage (after I dragged the WP biographia widget to the sidebar), which is good, yet no image shows up even when I uploaded a pic on gravatar (even though I have the “Show User’s Avatar” box checked.
Assuming you’re using the standard WordPress avatar mechanism and using Gravatars to provide the avatar image (in other words you’re not using another plugin to provide local avatar images or which uses a WordPress API call other than get_avatar()) then this is a 3 stage process. You’ll find the full version in this post – https://www.vicchi.org/codeage/wp-biographia/bending-wp-biographia-to-your-will-a-configuration-guide/ – but the quick and dirty version is as follows …
- Sign up for a Gravatar and upload your avatar image. The email address you use to sign up with must be the same as the email address in your WordPress profile.
- Enable use of avatars in the WordPress core. From the Dashboard navigate to Settings -> Discussion and under Avatars make sure that Show Avatars is checked under Avatar Display. Make sure you click on Save Changes.
- If you’re using WP Biographia to add the Biography Box to posts or pages, either automatically or via the shortcode, under Settings -> WP Biographia ->Content, make sure that User’s Image is checked and save changes. If you’re using the WP Biographia widget, ensure that Show User’s Avatar is checked.
2) The line breaks in my author bio is challenging as a layperson who knows nothing about codes. I tried my best, and copied the html code that was recommended to the functions.php, but of course no one ever mentioned “where” in the box to copy it to, other than “just insert it in the functions.php!” (the top? the bottom? there are like 500 lines in that box!) I copied it to the top of the box, updated it, and got strange lines of gibberish on the top of my website, so I took it out.
If you add the following, to the end of your theme’s functions.php file, which you’ll find at /wp-content/themes/your-theme-name/functions.php, just before the closing ?> PHP tag, you’ll be able to save line breaks in a user’s profile. You can do this either by wrapping the paragraphs in the HTML p tag or by using the HTML br tag.
remove_filter ('pre_user_description', 'wp_filter_kses');
add_filter('pre_user_description', 'wp_filter_post_kses');
add_filter('pre_user_description', 'wptexturize');
add_filter('pre_user_description', 'wpautop');
add_filter('pre_user_description', 'convert_chars');
add_filter('pre_user_description', 'balanceTags', 50);
3) Finally, I can’t seem to remove the search widget from my sidebar, even though I dragged it out of my “active” list to the inactive list. As a result, the search widget takes up space on the right side and makes my author bio column long and narrow. I know this isn’t a wp biographia thing, but even with the configuration guide, it’s like you need a phd to do this. and I have one lol.
This probably depends on your theme and whether your theme has a hard coded search widget in the post template files or whether it’s using a search widget or not. If one doesn’t appear under Appearance -> Widgets then it’s probably part of the theme.
Hope this all helps
-Gary
