WP About Author

Download | Official WordPress Plugin Page

This plugin is the easiest way to add a customizable author bio below your posts. The plugin works right out of the box with WordPress built in profiles.

Customization capabilities include

  • Three border styles to match any theme
  • Change background color with easy to use color picker
  • Display settings allow you to control when to display author bios
  • Display text links or icons to a users social media profiles
  • Change the size and shape of your avatar

This plugin also expands your profile page by adding fields for popular social media services so it’s easier for readers to follow your authors.

Check out some screenshots of WP About Author on WordPress.org

Installation

  • Upload the ‘wp-about-author’ folder to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory
  • Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
  • Edit your WordPress user profile
  • Use the settings page to choose when to display bios

169 replies on “WP About Author”

Love the plugin, but it stops another plugin (Retweetmeme Button) from working (no more retweets are counted). Any solution for this?

No, I’m sorry. It wasn’t your plugin, it was a server problem with retweet 🙂
the author plugin is working fine, although it should be nice to have an option to add more fields. I know manually added/changed some.

To show your photo, is easy, follow these steps:

1 – install the plugin “User Photo” from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/user-photo/
2 – Active the plugin
3 – Upload your photo using profile page (a new button to upload photo image)
4 – Access admin panel Config -> User Photo
Check the option “Serve Avatar as Fallback:” and “Override Avatar with User Photo:”
5 – See the result (tested with wordress 3.0.3)

Best Regards,

Rodrigo

I have followed all of your steps. I cannot get it to over ride and use my own photo with this plug in.

I am at a loss. 🙁

I am going to give it another try before I deactivate.

I have a gravatar account and have it set up to show the proper image for a few different emails. When I first installed this plugin it worked fine, but now I am getting the default (generated) images.

My proper gravatar displays in comments but not in the author box. Am I missing a setting? Also, is there a text that says “About the author” or does it just jump in with the name?

Thanks

Thanks for pointing this out. I can’t recreate the issue myself but I see what you are talking about on your website.

It seems as if the get_avatar function is adding "%20%20class= to the image link. I’ll try and figure out why this happening and will update the code.

Jon, Anyway to turn the Gravatar/photo function off? I like the look of the plug-in, but would prefer bio sans pictures.

Haven’t had a chance to look into this much yet. The last release just fixed some minor glitches. I’m hoping to do a bigger release sometime soon with this fix and some new customization capabilities.

Great plugin job. Thank you!

Is there an easy way to change where the link directs people when they click on the author’s name?

Love this plugin! I was able to do some style configurations so it matched the look and feel of my site. But, I too echo Bryan’s request. The only thing not working for me is that the author link directs to http://mysitename.com/author/the-authors-name.php which comes up as a 404 error page. I’m not proficient enough with WP or PHP to be able to figure out how to make this link go to the site specified in the author’s profile within the WP User’s settings. I have guest authors on my site, I’d like that link to go to their sites.

Hi Jon,

By default, the ‘about author’ display is just after the post. If I want to display it after ‘related posts’ , is there any option ?

Basically, what I am asking is , is it possible to change the position of the display ?

Thanks,
Kiran

Hi Kiran,

This might be tricky as I am able to choose priority in which post footer items are displayed its hard to find a place everyone can use. I will try and figure out a way to give the power to the people. Keep an eye out for future releases.

Hello!
Love the plugin! Just wanted to know if there is an easy way to exclude 1 or more categories so it wont post the author info on those posts in that category.

Thanks!

There is currently no easy way to do this but maybe I could integrate a custom post meta variable that when set to true will hide the author bio on that post/page. This isn’t a priority right now but something I will look into.

Jon,
First allow me to say thanks and keep up the good work. I skimmed through some of these other comments, Appears you have your hands full.

My one concern other than a few I may agree to here is, The space from the picture and the name of Author. (I agree that the font doesn’t have to be so large.

In order to see what is is I am talking about with all the dead space: http://www.rockfordremodeling.biz/blog/

Perhaps I did something wrong?

I’m hoping by allowing people to edit a template of sorts in the plugin settings will fix these kinds of problems. Every theme uses different CSS so it is hard to account for that. Hopefully I can get something out to the public soon.

Hi Jon,

Thanks for this great plugin! I have a small issue with my Gravator in my Author box. My pic looks squashed so I’m wondering if it’s due to my theme, the image I uploaded or something else. I’d appreciate your help!

Thanks!

I just played with the CSS file and if you change

.wp-about-author-pic img{
width: 100px;
}

to

.wp-about-author-pic img{
width: 100px; height: 100px;
}

it fixes the squashed image.

Hi Guys, I tried your plugin my blog but we are not getting author images. Please can you guys check on this give me the status? Or I am doing anything wrong here? Even I installed User Photo Plugin but still I am not getting. I hope i will get the reply soon. Thanks Dev

I have added the plugin, installed the additional plugin Rodrigo recommended and followed all of his steps.

1. I do not want this on every single page of my web site, I prefer for it to only be on my articles. (I have unchecked display on front page)

2. There is a white box surrounding my image. This is driving me a bit crazy. I keep modifying the user photo options and it does not seem to resolve it.

3. is the User Photo plugin uploading to gravatar?

Thank you for your efforts and for any guidance you have for me.

~ Maria

Not that I came here to talk to myself…

I have solved my dilemma of this showing up everywhere. This was my over-sight and I apologize for coming to you over this.

The User Photo only seems to be pulling in my image from gravatar.com. I cannot seem to over-ride and use my own photo with this plugin. (I did check the two boxes in User Photo Control Panel) This is driving me crazy, because the white space around my photo is driving me totally nuts and makes it look unprofessional and poorly placed.

Thanks.

Great plug-in!

I have a problem that I hope is a simple fix. My bio information does not come up to the right of my gravatar pic, but instead below it and still to the left. This ends up for a huge box. Am I doing something wrong? I activated it and inserted my bio in my WP profile.

though it is great plugin but i would like to do the same in my theme. As we all know that plugins make your website loads little bit slower, And i am trying to load my website in less than 3 seconds.

Hi,

Love this plugin. I have a question though, is there a way to display all authors on a single page ie take all the “About Author” boxes – and stick ’em on a “Meet The Team” page?

Hi again,

I was really interested in hearing if there is any way to create a page with all the About Author boxes on it. That would be a fantastic thing!

Thanks in advance.

How do I get the author bio to show up in rss feeds? Right now it just doesn’t attach and there doesn’t seem to be an option to get it to do so.

Thanks!

Hi there, I was wondering if there was any progress on the custom post meta/exclude categories feature.
That is something I could really use.

Other than that, great job!

Hi, I wanted to say that I your plugin works beautifully in its current form. I wanted to get this feature working for author pages/bios/archives/etc., but I’m not good with the innards of WP plugins, so I used raw PHP and CSS to apply something very similar to your plugin’s functionality for author archives. Unfortunately, the site’s still under construction (and in disarray), so I don’t want to link it from here just yet.

But anyway, thanks for the plugin and the inspiration.

I’ve noticed a problem on the bio pages. It seems to remove parts of my theme’s CSS, like the mainpage area spacing and background.

I’ve been trying to solve this one all day with no luck. Even tried adding the “#mainpage” section to the wp-about-author.css file.

Is there a way to fix this?

how can i change the position of the plugin?
in other words: is there a short code to place it in the theme?

I was very interested in using this but I’m not interested in using Gravatars. I tried using the option Override Avatar with User Photo, but it didn’t work.

Hey Jon,
do you think you can add the new Google author feature? It would be great if we could just enter our “Author Page” in a dedicated input field in our profile (authors bio doesn’t allow any rel information for some reason).

Your plugin could than show the authors link where it shows Twitter, Facebook, etc. using the correct rel=author attribution.

Ideally, you could make it even optional fpr each different post, if the author info should be shown. Just for the sake of guestblogging 🙂

You can find more info on that topic on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1229920 and http://yoast.com/wordpress-rel-author-rel-me/

Cheers
Pascal

Jon,

I noticed that several people asked, but I didn’t see an answer (sorry if I missed it). Is there a way to exclude the box from individual pages? I love the plugin, but I won’t be able to use it if it has to be EVERY page or none.

Thanks,

Sarah

Hey Jon, first thanks for the plugin. I found it great, although one problem I still can’t figure out the solution is why the profile pic is trimmed horizontally. I’m looking something at the CSS files of your plugin as well in the User Photo plugin, but I haven’t fix it yet. I already read previous comments however, it seems the solution has never been posted. Anyway, thanks again and will try to see if I fix it…

-Bert

The plugin is very cool — but I wish it worked via an embed tag like: [authorbio]

…rather than appearing on every page. I’ve got a site which is 90% my content and 10% needs attribution to other authors. I don’t need the bio on every page.

[…] About Author – It helps to be able to talk about the writers of the myriad posts on the Internet. This plugin lets you do that, with a decent variety of options, including border style options, background color options, and view-ability options. It also expands the basic profile fields to include popular social media platforms, the easier to check out the writers on our blog. […]

Cool plugin thank you!! Jon, could you or anyone please share:

1. how may I limited the words number in the author’s bio?
2. change so author name gos to their bio rather than their posts?

thank you for any feedback you may have

This plugin has options to show/not show on single posts, pages, search, et cetera. But how can I prevent the author box from showing on ‘events’, created with another plugin. The single events are regarded by wp as ‘regular posts’.

Great work!

I’d like to request rounded corners. I would also like to be able to choose the color of the borders as well.

Keep it up! You’re doing a great job!

I use WPML plugin to translate my website between English and Turkish. String Translation finds the entered English author bio text, and offers me the possibility to translate and save it, which I do. But on my Turkish posts, the author bio is still in English. What could be causing this? Thank you !!

Hi! I would like to know why I cannot implement or on displaying Biographical info. I have 3 paragraphs to post for the Author’s Bio. Let me know if there’s anyway we could do this.

Hi! I would like to know why I cannot implement or on displaying Biographical info. I have 3 paragraphs to post for the Author’s Bio. Let me know if there’s anyway we could do this. My sample page:
http://bit.ly/zacdlA

I’m newbie to WP and this is a great plugin, I just have two stupid questions:

– How do I upload an author picture, I can’t find it in edit profile.
– My theme already include some author info, but not as complete as this, what can I do to avoid having two author boxes above an article?

I noticed that for the twitter link to work in your plug in it requires only the @name, but for it to work in the wordpress author page you need the full URL.

So one is always not working. Can you add a setting or change it to use the full URL like wordpress?

In my case the about the author pic img was to far left (only IE).

I had to overwrite the inherited margin-left in the css file:

.wp-about-author-pic img{
width: 100px;
height: 100px;
max-width: 100px;
margin-left:0px;
}

I hope others will find this usefull

I would like to opt out of having an author box on certain templates. I’m currently building out a directory area on the site, and I don’t want author boxes in this section. Please advise. Thanks!

Hi — did anyone figure out how to exclude the about author box from certain pages?

Also, do we know how to change the background color of the box??

Help is much appreciated!

You go to your wordpress dashboard, under ‘Settings’ menu there’s WP About Author options.

You can change exclude or include the box from/for certain pages and you can change the background color too.

Not sure if question already asked, but how can you selectively remove About Author box for different users? (some users would like box, whilst others do not)

One more question. Seem to be stuck in html mode and another plugin (TinyMCE Advanced) is shot (post WP About Author) installation. Anyone else have this problem? If so, any suggestions to rectify problems? Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

[…] About Author – It helps to be able to talk about the writers of the myriad posts on the Internet. This plugin lets you do that, with a decent variety of options, including border style options, background color options, and view-ability options. It also expands the basic profile fields to include popular social media platforms, the easier to check out the writers on our blog. […]

Great plugin, compliments!
I would like that my social links open in a new browser window ( the same effect of the html like tag “target=_blank).
Could you add this option on next update, please?

Hi, I’ve just done it.

Go to Line 122 of wp-about-author.php and add target=’_blank’ to that line so then it looks like this:

a target=’_blank’ href='”.str_replace(‘%%username%%’ […etc…]

Hope it helps!

Hi Jon, Love the plugin, I have found a couple of issues though.

1) The plugin adds an extra slash into icon urls e.g. /wp-about-author//images/linkedin.png

2) There is a conflict with Yoast SEO. His plugin grabs content of the Google+ profile box complete/as is to create a rel=”author” link, yours grabs the user id and adds the domain. Not sure who is right on this one…..

For my purposes, I did quick edit of the plugin. Thanks for your work on this plugin.

Perfect plugin for what I need – however – how do I tied this in with Gravatar? I have a Gravatar, but I’m not really sure how to make the plugin show my gravatar – if that makes sense. Anyone know how to do so?

I’m wondering if anyone has code to insert this into a specific template file. I’m trying to call this in an authors.php page and can’t seem to get it working. Do you have a codex for calling this plugin manually?

Rahnamafard

Check IE version. If it’s more than 8 press F12 and setting as IE7.

Then try again you can see the color value as #ff0329 like this. Just type as #ffffff or something else whatever you want manually.

Hello, is there a way to prevent the “about author” plugin from showing
up on my site’s portfolio pages (which are actually posts)? My theme is
set up to create portfolio pages as posts. I only want it to show up on
my actual blog articles. Thanks for any help.

Jon,
Thanks for this great plugin. My question is: is there a way to show *two* user bios for one post? I’m working with students who are joint-authoring posts, and so I would like both of their profiles and photos to appear at the bottom of their joint post. Thanks for your help.

Anyone know how to get a picture in this thing?

I tried user photo plugin, and can’t get it to work.

Anyone know how to get a picture in the Author box? I tried user photo and nothing, and i can’t seem to find a setting for it.

Love the plugin! Would be really great if in the future you’d add an Instagram option and the ability to add a custom icon set.

Hi. I would like to use the author box to write a bio about the person in the post versus the author. Does it have to be the author is there a way to customize it?

I cannot for the life of me figure out where you actually upload your profile picture to work with this plugin. Running WP 4.0 is that the issue? Any suggestions would be great. The plugin works great except I have a gray avatar right now!

Where do I edit the Author Bio? I see an option to include Author Bio in my sidebar, but I don’t see where to edit this info.

Hi,

for some reason all my text is right aligned when the author section is displayed in responsive mode in portrait position. It looks really bad, how do I correct it?

It puts an author post box on every single quiz question for Sensei. Sadly, this means I had to discontinue use as it made my site look unprofessional and nasty. Let me know if you ever fix this issue, and I’ll possibly use it again.

My theme, Twenty-Sixteen, shows the social media buttons one to a line, making the box quite big. Is there some tweek for this that can make them display all in one line?

This plugin looks great. I have a website that uses Easy Digital Downloads. Is there a way for the author box to only appear at the bottom of blog posts and prevent it from appearing at the bottom of a download? Thank you.

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