Simplify Editing Experience for Author Biographical Info Field

[mehul0810]

Challenge: The current "Biographical Info" field in user profiles only supports plain text. Many site owners and content teams want to provide basic structure or emphasis in author bio, but they cannot use any formatting such as bold, italic, links, or simple lists. This limitation is not ideal for non-technical users.

Potential Solution: Introduce minimal rich-text support for the Biographical Info field by replacing the plain <textarea> with a TinyMCE-powered classic editor instance. The formatting options can remain intentionally limited (e.g., bold, italic, links, bullet/numbered lists) to maintain simplicity.

[westonruter]

The author description field was introduced way back in r674.

Adding rich text to this field was similarly requested for the taxonomy term description in #20901.

[westonruter]

Are there any examples of TinyMCE being used like this for other screens? I feel that using TinyMCE nowadays may be somewhat obsolete, and that ideally the block editor (or some component of the block editor) should ideally be used instead.

See comment.

[azaozz]

Replying to westonruter:

using TinyMCE nowadays may be somewhat obsolete, and that ideally the block editor (or some component of the block editor) should ideally be used instead.

+1. TinyMCE is old, obsolete and mostly unmaintained. Using the actual WP editor (a.k.a. block editor, Gutenberg) for these fields would be a better user experience and way easier to maintain.