How to Use WP Post Author to Show Creators in WordPress

Every piece of content on your site is written by an author, and the author box allows you to display their information to your audience. However, like most things, there are several kinds of authors to display, and the WP Post Author plugin can help.

For example, you may want to highlight a guest blogger as part of a WordPress collaboration, or to make the most out of their name to boost traffic. Having a special author box for them can help highlight that in WordPress.

Of course, that’s just one example. In other cases, you may have multiple authors working on a single piece, which will also require a unique author box. Luckily, all of this can be accomplished with the WP Post Author plugin.

Today, I will demonstrate how you can add custom author boxes in WordPress with WP Post Author.

What Is an Author Box in WordPress?

The Author box in WordPress is a small area that showcases the author of a post or blog in WordPress. They come in many forms and sizes, but usually contain the author’s name, a short biography, a picture, and sometimes links to their social media pages.

The box will usually match the design of your theme, but you can always add custom CSS to change the appearance. This can help you match any other custom changes you may have made to the theme.

The plugin we are about to cover gives you control over all of these aspects and more.

How to Create Author Boxes in WordPress

The WP Post Author is a great plugin when it comes to author boxes. With it, you can create author boxes for everyone including co-authors and guest bloggers. And it doesn’t take much effort to achieve.

It’s worth noting that the plugin has many features beyond just author boxes. For instance, it also introduces a post rating system that users can use to leave feedback on your content. There is also a drag-and-drop registration form builder.

While we are not covering these features, I highly encourage you to take a look as they can benefit your entire site.

Step 1: Install WP Post Author

Let’s start by clicking on Plugins and selecting the Add New option on the left-hand admin panel.

Search for WP Post Author in the available search box. This will pull up additional plugins that you may find helpful.

Find the WP Post Author plugin and click on the “Install Now” button and activate the plugin for use.

Note: The full plugin name is “Enhance Your Posts with Author Box, Social Links, Co-Authors, Guest Authors, and Post Rating System, including User Registration Form Builder – WP Post Author,” so be on the lookout for it.

Step 2: Configure the Settings

The plugin is rather simple to use as you just need to choose a few settings to configure the appearance of the author box,. By default, it will appear on all posts with the correct author data added.

To find the settings, click on WP Post Author and select the Advanced Settings option.

When going through this, you will be asked if you want to opt into regular emails informing you about when the plugin is updated. Feel free to skip it or accept as it has no influence over using the plugin.

The Global Settings contain most of the settings we will be configuring today. The first option is the title of the Author box. By default, it is set to “About the Author” but you can change it to anything you want.

Below this, you will find a series of options that allow you to customize various aspects of the author box. This includes setting the alignment, the shape of the image box, social icon shapes, highlight color, and more.

Simply choose the options you want to use. You can change them at any time, so don’t worry too much.

Below these are two additional options. The first one is choosing what content the author box will appear on. You can choose between post and page content, but by default, only the Post option is selected.

The other option is to disable automatically displaying the author box on the selected content type. If you choose to disable it, you will have to manually add the author boxes to each post using shortcodes or the block.

Be sure to click on the “Save Changes” button when you are done in the Global Settings. Now, click on the Multi Authors tab at the top.

Here, you will find a single option to enable the plugin to support co-authors and guest authors. Simply check the box if you want to use these features. Or leave it unchecked if you don’t.

Don’t forget to click on the “Save Changes” button. And that’s it. The other tabs are not going to be covered in this tutorial as they deal with other features the plugin offers like introducing a rating system in WordPress.

Step 3: Add the Author Box

If you left the automatic option for displaying author boxes on, then the plugin is already working and active on your site. If you check your posts, you should see an author box at the bottom like so:

Note: All of the author’s information comes from the author’s profile in WordPress. This can be found in the Users section of WordPress.

Now if you choose to disable the author box from automatically being added, you have two choices. The first is to use the Post Author Box block. The block will add a generic author box to WordPress. You can then fill out the information manually.

I do not recommend using this as it would be extremely tedious to fill out and customize every single time. Instead, the shortcode achieves the same result as the automatic display, but you just need to add the shortcode.

In this case, the shortcode is “[wp-post-author]” and you just need to add it to a shortcode block. The shortcode approach allows you to add anywhere in the post, so you actually have more options with the shortcode.

Co-Authors

The above steps only work for the lone author you have assigned to a post, but what happens if you want to show the co-author as well? Well, if you enable the co-author setting, all you need to do is add the co-author to that post.

Locate the Authors section in the post settings. Use the Select Author drop-down to choose an additional author to add to the post.

There is actually no limit on how many authors you can add, so feel free to add multiple if needed. From here, the process is identical to adding a single author box. Just be sure to save the changes.

You can arrange the author order by moving the authors around in the Authors box.

Guest Authors

Many blogs will invite guests to write for them. As such, it is only natural to want to show the guest author in WordPress, which this plugin makes easy. Again, you need to enable the guest author box portion of the plugin to do this.

Doing so actually adds a new setting to the plugin called Guest Users. Click on it.

This area is blank by default. Click on the “Add New” button at the top. Here, you can enter all of the information for the guest users. This includes their name, description, email, website, social media accounts, and image.

Note: A valid email address is necessary. However, you never need to access it.

Simply fill out all of the information and click on the “Create Guest Author” button at the bottom.

From here, you can go to any post, go to the author’s section, and choose the guest account. You can even remove the actual author so only the guest account appears in the author box.

And that’s really all there is to adding author boxes in WordPress with the WP Post Author plugin.

Add An Author Box in WordPress Today

As you can see, it is rather easy to add an author box in WordPress with the help of the WP Post Author plugin. It has a lot of customization options and even supports adding CSS to customize it further.

On top of just supporting regular authors, it adds the ability for co-authors and guest authors in WordPress. This gives you far more options than the default WordPress tools provide.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful in using WP Post Author for WordPress.

Do you think WordPress should support co-authors by default? Do you think author boxes are a good addition?

The post How to Use WP Post Author to Show Creators in WordPress appeared first on GreenGeeks.