Since I don’t consider my blog anonymous or ‘seekrit’ I grabbed a text widget and started adding an “About Me’ to my sidebar. After trying to get things aligned, formatted, and adding a few links I started thinking a widget might be nice for this. I had not seen anything like this around, so here it is, my first widget.
“*Fixed in 0.96: Align didn’t work in some themes.”
Here are some installation instructions:
- Click the download link below to get the latest version
- Drop the AboutMe folder into your wp-content/plugins folder
- Go to your Administration:Plugins page and activate the About Me Widget
To configure:
- Go to Presentation:Widgets
- Move (drag and drop) the widget to where you would like it in your active sidebar
- Click on the config button for the About Me widget (little notepad icon thingy on the right)
- Enter the title you want visitors to see on the sidebar
- Click in the editor window and start designing your own widget!!!
Put together a generic ‘about me’ design:
- Select the image icon above the editor (looks like a tree)
- Enter the URL (path) to the image (relative is fine, e.g.; /wp-content/uploads/portrait.jpg)
- Enter Image Description, Title
- Select the appearance tab and use the pull-down menu to apply an alignment class
- Click the Update button
- Back in the editor now, type some text (a blurb about yourself or your site)
- Hi-lite the text and use the pull-down styles menu to apply alignment class/style
- Add some links, if you wish, then repeat #7 to the link/anchor text
- Close the config window when you’re finished and hit the Save Changes button
This widget is working in current versions of WordPress (2.8+). Please note link to the WP Plugin Directory below…
Here is a current working version: About Me Widget Thanks to John BouAntoun!
*Fixed in v0.91: Cannot select left or right alignment. *Added: Configurable titles for image and links. Thanks Steen.
*Fixed in v0.92: Image ‘alt’ and ‘title’ attributes working now.
*Changed in v0.93: “blurb” respects newlines. Thanks Andy Skelton.
*Fixed in 0.94: Overlapping text issue with default admin theme. Thanks Aaron Brazell. *Added: Configurable font color.
*Added in 0.95: Function getimagesize() added to maintain xhtml validity and page speed.
*Fixed in 0.96: Align didn’t work in some themes. Thanks JR Rozko.
*Fixed in 0.97: Took out the clear that was breaking some themes/sidebars.
*Fixed in 0.98: A solution for people on Dreamhost (and others with hosts using safe_mode/curl). This solution does not use a curl wrapper, but falls back to a relative path. It will require the user to place the image in /wp-content/uploads/. Thanks to Martin Cleaver who generously gave me a temp site at Dreamhost for testing!
*Re-design for 1.0beta: Uses WordPress’ built-in TinyMCE editor for layout/design, produces valid XHTML 1.0 Strict (though this can be broken ;’), designed and tested in WordPress 2.2.1.
*Fixed in 1.01: Bad path to the Image plugin (gave a 404-Not Found), dialed in lineheight – 09/02/07
*Fixed in 1.02: If auto-installed from wordpress.org, TinyMCE would have no buttons (plugin directory name no longer hard-coded). Thanks to guybrush – 09/14/07
-1.03: Sync’ing with http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/about-me-widget/
-1.04: ditto above
Previous non-TinyMCE version (stable): About Me Widget v0.98
As of 11/16/07 there have been over 14,300 downloads of the About Me Widget. wow.
Feedback appreciated!
Sorry folks, but I haven’t had time to support this since 2.3.1. If you’d like to throw some money my way, I could update it, but until I have more free time I have to give it a low priority.
That’s too bad Sam will not work on the widget anymore. It looked so nice in the earlier WordPress versions. Can anyone here take up Sam’s work and make an update?
Very good i def. use it soon
Sam – the widget’s not working at all now. Maybe you should put a note up to let people know.
@Tim: It was discussed in the comments, but I added some notes in the post.
Since the update of wordpress to version 2.9, plugin abou me widget no longer works. Will there a correction to make it compatible? Thank you! Best regards
Hi I have your widget installed on my coprophagia website using 2.9. It stopped working, is this because of the recent upgrade?
@dogpoopguy; Yes, apparently 2.9 breaks the editor for the widget…
Moving discussion to the forum topic
Closing comments here, there are so many it’s no longer practical!