Question

I am building a child theme in WordPress that needs some custom functionality (for an example, I want to show an author bio on things in the ‘fiction’ category, but not in the ‘fiction-contest’ category, though they otherwise look the same).

It seems that no matter how specific my templates are, eventually I run into one of two things:

the_content();

or

get_template_part( 'content', get_post_format() );

This is the part I want to have finer control over. Yet it seems I can only grab content as a big chunk. My workaround has been to style parts of the content as “display: none”, depending on the template being used, but is there a way to conditionally change actual content returned by the above code? If so, how and where would I do that?

Answer 1

the_content() should return only the post contents. The author information should not be included unless the author explicitly listed it within the post.

I believe you are looking for something along the lines of:

<?php

    // This array can contain category IDs, names, or slugs.
    // I went with an array for the ability to easily extend in the future.
    $cats_for_bio = array(
        "Fiction",
        "OtherCategory"
    );

    if ( in_category($cats_for_bio) ) {

        // You need to get the author id since we are outside of the loop.
        $authorID = $posts[0]->post_author;

        // Place your bio output code here as you please.
        // This example just grabs the author name and description.

        $authorName = get_the_author_meta("first_name", $authorID) . " ";
        $authorName .= get_the_author_meta("last_name", $authorID);

        $authorDesc = get_the_author_meta("user_description", $authorID);

        $authorBio = "<p><b>Author:</b> $authorName</p>/n";
        $authorBio .= "<p><b>Bio:</b> $authorDesc</p>/n";

        echo $authorBio;
    }
?>

Being that you are creating your own theme you can easily use the function get_the_content()… This will give you the content without echoing it… the downside of this is the filters that apply to the_content() are no longer applied. You can get the content with the filters from the get_the_content() function by using apply_filters(‘the_content’, $content) with $content being the return variable sent by get_the_content()

A third option which was previously mentioned is to create your own filter… this would be best done in a plugin and would be able to be applied to any theme you may use in the future.