How to restrict biographical info length and content in WordPress?

1 comment

1. For the Javascript side, you should attach the necessary events to the description field. You can load your script via the wp_enqueue_script hook, and you probably want to do all this in your handler for admin_enqueue_scripts, where you check for the passed $hook_name, which in this case is the page name. It is user-edit.php when an admin edits a user, and profile.php when the user edits their own information (in which case IS_PROFILE_PAGE will also be defined as TRUE).

   add_action('admin_enqueue_scripts', 'add_description_validation_script');
   function add_description_validation_script($pagename) {
      if ($pagename == 'profile.php' || $pagename == 'user-edit.php') {
         wp_enqueue_script('description_validation', '/path/to/description_validation.js');
      }
   }
   

   For the PHP side, you need the pre_user_description filter. This gives you the current biographical text, and your function can change this and return something else.

   add_filter('pre_user_description', 'sanitize_description');
   function sanitize_description($description)
   {
      // Do stuff with the description
      return $description;
   }
   

   If, instead of silently changing the description, you want to show an error, you should look into the user_profile_update_errors hook. There you can validate the given data and return error messages to the user.

   You probably want to wrap this all up in a plugin, so you can keep the code together and easily enable or disable it. A plugin is just a file in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, most likely in a subdirectory named after your plugin.

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