How to remove Biography from user profile admin page

Question

I would like to remove or hide the Biography input field from the profile page. How do you do this? I already removed some contact methods from this page, but I'm not sure how to get rid of the biography.

Answer 1

There is no dedicated hook – user management is a low priority in WordPress. You have to use output buffering (yes, not nice).

Here is a simple demonstration how this could be done:

add_action( 'personal_options', array ( 'T5_Hide_Profile_Bio_Box', 'start' ) );

/**
 * Captures the part with the biobox in an output buffer and removes it.
 *
 * @author Thomas Scholz, <info@toscho.de>
 *
 */
class T5_Hide_Profile_Bio_Box
{
    /**
     * Called on 'personal_options'.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public static function start()
    {
        $action = ( IS_PROFILE_PAGE ? 'show' : 'edit' ) . '_user_profile';
        add_action( $action, array ( __CLASS__, 'stop' ) );
        ob_start();
    }

    /**
     * Strips the bio box from the buffered content.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public static function stop()
    {
        $html = ob_get_contents();
        ob_end_clean();

        // remove the headline
        $headline = __( IS_PROFILE_PAGE ? 'About Yourself' : 'About the user' );
        $html = str_replace( '<h3>' . $headline . '</h3>', '', $html );

        // remove the table row
        $html = preg_replace( '~<tr>\s*<th><label for="description".*</tr>~imsUu', '', $html );
        print $html;
    }
}

You can download the code as a standalone plugin: Plugin Remove Bio Box.

Before

After

The password fields are now under Contact Info … if you don’t like that, add a headline in stop() – and take care for I18n. ;)