About {Speaker} section on WC Session pages

Welcome!

This is the home of the Make Community team for the WordPress open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project!

Here is where we have policy debates, project announcements, and assist community members in organizing events.

Everyone is welcome to comment on posts and participate in the discussions regardless of skill level or experience.

Discussion on Slack

Of all of the Sessions on the the WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. London 2017 site, one of them had an About {Speaker} section at the bottom.

The author of the Session post is forced to be set (changeset) as the Speaker, even though they are not a User on the WC site.

If the Speaker has populated the Bio field at their https://wordpress.org/support/users/{username} profile, then in the Twenty Thirteen theme at least, this is automatically pulled in and displayed on the Session.

This has some connotations:

The WC site becomes inconsistent. For WCLDN, we appear to have just 1 out of 44 speakers who happens to:

a. have a /support/ (Make.WP?) profile
b. have filled in the Bio.

As organisers that means we either need to hide the About box with CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site., or accept that page content is going to be inconsistent.
Organisers are not in full control of the content on their site. I wouldn’t expect those chosen to speak to fill out their bios with links to the usual spam sites, but they may add in political or offensive statements, or forms of free advertising, that the organisers wouldn’t wish to promote.
Since this bio can be updated at any time, and instantly appears on sites they’ve previously spoken at, there’s a chance that someone who spoke at a WC several years ago could be using this functionality on a site that none of the organisers are checking any longer.

In addition, the About box contains a link to “View all posts by …”, which results in a 404 page, and that just looks shoddy.

Suggestion

Don’t display About {Speaker} sections on Sessions. The Session already has a link automatically added which links to the Speaker page, and that usually contains the bio that may well be custom for this site and the relevant for the talk they are giving.

Ian Dunn 6:20 pm on February 14, 2017

This has some connotations

I agree with most of those, and would add this one: the w.org/support bio isn’t tailored to the specific WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more., but the one from the Speaker post is. So, the one from the Speaker post is much more relevant and accurate in this context. If we’re going to display a bio somewhere, it should be that one.

I agree that for consistency, though, it’s better to not display a bio on the Session pages at all, so I’d vote +1 for this proposal.

As far as the technical implementation goes, it seems like a callback for the `get_the_author_description` filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. might be the most appropriate way to handle it. The callback could just do something like: `if the post_type equals ‘wcb_session’, then return an empty string`.
- Corey McKrill 6:28 pm on February 14, 2017
  
  Along the same lines, we could probably remove the code in the changeset linked above, and instead add a filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. to the “Posted by %s” output on `wcb_session` posts. This would eliminate the confusion of having the post author get automatically switched to a user who isn’t on the organizing team.
  - Ian Dunn 12:27 am on February 15, 2017
    
    I like that idea, but I’m not sure there’s a filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. we can use. At first glance, it seems like every theme does it differently.

Welcome!

Get Involved

Let’s Talk

Learn More

About {Speaker} section on WC Session pages

Welcome!

Get Involved

Let’s Talk

Learn More

Share this: