Change character length of author bios

Hi,

We need to have longer bios than the 200 char limit, we did used to change this within the ghost.min js file but this doesn’t work anymore in the latest version (3.3.0), has this been moved? where do we now change it?

Hi @Emma_Rayfield. This seems like a risky thing to do, editing the minified code could have unknown affects elsewhere. Could this not be done with a custom page that shares the same name as the author? That way you’d get the full editing experience shown in the page view :slight_smile:

Hi @DavidDarnes, this is what we were recommended to do before knowing that it was risky. We just need to change the bios from 200 to 500 and we have a lot of authors so making a page for each one would be lengthly processes

If you don’t want to create a custom template per author, what if instead each author page used the standard author template, but included a link at the end of the bio that said “keep reading…”. I feel like (without trying it myself) that the URL in the template could be automatically generated using handlebars; e.g. <a href=“/{{ author }}-bio/“>keep reading…</a>

It’d keep your code vanilla, while allowing your authors to easily create a page with their full bio using existing Ghost tools (so long as they set the page slugs to authorslug-bio.

I haven’t tested that! Just an idea. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi

We managed to do our usual edits to the core files and restart ghost again and for some reason it worked.
Although this is risky having author pages wouldnt work for us as we want to display the full bio at the bottom of their blog post and need to keep the url the same. Would be great if the bio character length could be changed via a settings yaml file like the routes

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@Emma_Rayfield can you share which files you modified for this? The 200 character limit is extremely limiting. It shouldn’t be up to Ghost to decide how long author bios should be. They should have a default length, but give us the option to change that default length. It doesn’t look like any progress has been done on this in years, so we’re just going to have to modify the internals to get what we need. While being able to modify this from the admin would be ideal, Ghost allows for custom themes and is open-source instead of being locked in to a specific aesthetic like medium and substack, so I wish they’d at least document how to do this if we need to.

Agree. Don’t mind editing the theme files, and am comfortable with coding and testing. If someone would please post which files to edit, that would be great.

@BruceInLouisville I was able to inspect Ghost’s source code and see how to modify it. Had to modify undocumented core files, so it’s possible they may be overwritten by a ghost update, but it works for now. Since it requires modifying undocumented core files, I’m not going to post the instructions here, as someone might break their install if they do it wrong without a backup. However, I am a management consultant specializing in technology with over 15 years of web development experience, and I would be happy to help you get this set up for your installation as an independent consultant not affiliated with Ghost org, and without warranty. Just DM me.