preserving HTML

Several of the description fields in WordPress will strip any HTML entered into them. You can preserve them with a little work, though.

User Descriptions

The biography field on the user profile page accepts a limited number of HTML tags — the same ones allowed in comments. If you need to create richer biographies for your users, you can preserve HTML by adding the following to your functions.php file:

remove_filter( 'pre_user_description', 'wp_filter_kses' );

Category, Tag, and Taxonomy Descriptions

The taxonomy description fields also prevent you from entering some HTML. To keep it, add this to functions.php:

remove_filter( 'pre_term_description', 'wp_filter_kses' );
remove_filter( 'term_description', 'wp_kses_data' );

Excerpts

As I’ve mentioned before, there is no easy way to filter the excerpt function to preserve HTML; the PHP strip_tags() function is part of the_excerpt(), and there’s no getting around it without recreating the function altogether¹. That’s exactly what the Advanced Excerpt plugin does. Download and activate it, and your HTML stays right where you put it.

¹ If you’d like to see the_excerpt changed to allow HTML, add a comment on this bug report.