Allowing HTML in Wordpress Profile Descriptions

August 21, 2007

This is a short, technical post on how to solve a problem with Wordpress. I realize it will only apply to some, but it is the answer to those who need it.

The problem is that the profile field for authors in Wordpress is very limiting, by default. It strips all HTML out of the field, which means you cannot include links, images, even basic formatting. In my opinion, this is really stupid and I don’t know why the Wordpress guys decided to do that. Unfortunately, the way they did it makes use of the filter system in Wordpress. To my knowledge, then, you cannot undo it with a plug-in (I may be wrong). The good news is that it is really easy to stop the filter from working.

To do this, open up /wp-includes/registration.php in a text editor. Then, find the following code:

$description = apply_filters('pre_user_description', $description);

Comment it out by putting two slashes in front of it, making it:

//$description = apply_filters('pre_user_description', $description);

This is a quick and dirty way to allow anything into the author description field in Wordpress.

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Comments
Comment by Terra Andersen on August 21, 2007 @ 10:31 pm

I always wondered about that, thanks!

-Terra
http://www.BetterForBusiness.com

Comment by sokai on October 12, 2007 @ 7:24 am

Dear David,

a better solution is to add the following two lines to the functions.php of the theme you are using:
//http://wordpress.org/support/topic/121789
remove_filter('pre_user_description', 'wp_filter_kses');

Best regards
Kai

Comment by fimp on April 29, 2008 @ 4:22 pm

Have you tested this with Wordpress 2.5? It doesn’t seem to work on mine.

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