Run wpautop on author bio

[henry.wright]

The wpautop function replaces double line-breaks with paragraph elements. It's executed on various items of content. Post content and term descriptions (used in category descriptions) are some examples.

I believe the author bio would benefit from wpautop.

[henry.wright]

40040.diff runs wptexturize, convert_chars, wpautop and shortcode_unautop on the author description field.

[johnbillion]

Pending some testing by Henry as discussed at Open Source Sprint London.

[henry.wright]

Using the_archive_description() in archive.php will output:

• a term description if the current page is example.com/category/slug (or example.com/tag/slug for example)
• an author's bio if the current page is example.com/author/username

Support for author bio was added in 4.7.0.

The reason for this ticket is the output of the_archive_description() is now inconsistent.

The term description is run through 4 functions:

• wptexturize
• convert_chars
• wpautop
• shortcode_unautop

However, the author bio isn't run through these.

This results in the front end source code looking like this:

In example.com/category/slug:

<p>This is a term description &#038; convert_chars and wpautop have run on it</p>

In example.com/author/username:

This is an author bio & convert_chars and wpautop have not run on it

40040.diff will make the category, tag and author archive output of the_author_description() consistent.

Running the_author_description() through one of the 4 functions manually didn't change the output so if end-users are doing this nothing will change for them after the introduction of this patch.

• wptexturize( the_author_description() )
• convert_chars( the_author_description() )
• wpautop( the_author_description() )
• shortcode_unautop( the_author_description() )

[johnbillion]

In 41172:

Formatting: Add formatting and texturization to author descriptions so they match the formatting of term descriptions.

Props henry.wright

Fixes #40040

[johnbillion]

Pro tip for testing locally: Run the tests against the correct installation.

This broke Tests_User_Author_Template::test_get_the_author_meta()

[johnbillion]

@henry.wright since #38487, a post type archive description cane be output by the_archive_description() too, but it also lacks wpautop() etc. Wanna knock up a patch?

I'll look at fixing the test mentioned above.

[johnbillion]

In 41173:

Formatting: Update the author description tests since the formatting change made in [41172].

See #40040

[henry.wright]

Replying to johnbillion:

@henry.wright since #38487, a post type archive description cane be output by the_archive_description() too, but it also lacks wpautop() etc. Wanna knock up a patch?

Sure! 40040.1.diff is my stab at it. I first created a function to get the post type archive description and make that description filterable. I then used the new filter in default-filters.php.

[henry.wright]

get_the_post_type_description() seems a more appropriate name than get_the_post_type_archive_description(). 40040.2.diff changes the name of the new function.

[johnbillion]

In 41232:

Formatting: Introduce get_the_post_type_description() to allow post type archive descriptions to be formatted the same as author and term archives.

Props henry.wright

Fixes #40040

[afercia]

Has this been mentioned in a dev notes blog post or elsewhere? Though minor, it's a breaking change and authors should have been informed. For a first report, see #42578.

[Ov3rfly]

More reports will probably follow for Twenty Sixteen 1.4, Twenty Fifteen 1.9, Twenty Thirteen 2.3, Twenty Twelve 2.4, Jetpack 5.5, etc.

[mrahmadawais]

OK, this wpautop has broken so many themes. It has started inserting p tags on the Author bio which are not styled.

[henry.wright]

@johnbillion what are your thoughts? Themes must be supporting <p> tags in term descriptions but it seems they're often not supporting them in the author description.

[rabmalin]

Strange that this breaking change went to the core so silently. Even default themes have not been updated to fix this. Eg, in Twenty Twelve, there is <p><?php the_author_meta( 'description' ); ?></p>

[johnbillion]

Follow-up to revert this change: #42578

[SergeyBiryukov]

Reverted in [42441] due to backward compatibility concerns.