This integration lets you credit more than one author on a post. All of them appear in the byline alongside the main author.
It is self contained, with no third party plugin required, and it works for posts. Pages and other content types are not affected.
It stores the authors, and the theme draws them.
General purpose co-author plugins tend to bring their own templating assumptions and their own markup, which leaves you with a byline you then have to restyle to match the rest of the site. This integration only stores who is credited and hands that list to the theme, which draws it in its own byline, its own listings and its own author cards. Nothing is pasted in, and there is no second plugin to keep updated.
It has no settings page: it does one thing, and there is nothing global to configure.
#Two kinds of author
- Site users
People with a WordPress account. The normal case for an editorial team.
- Guest authors
People without an account. An invited writer, an interviewee, the author of a reprint. You do not need to give them admin access, and you should not.
To a reader, the two look identical in the byline. The only difference is where the profile comes from.
#How you use it
Everything happens on the post itself, in a field group in the editor sidebar.
The first field selects co-authors. The list holds site users and guest authors together, so you can mix them and put them in the order you want.
The second field is a switch that removes the main author from the byline. It is for a post written entirely by a guest, where an editor account only published it.
A post can never end up with no author.
With no co-authors selected, the switch that hides the main author does nothing at all. The two fields are independent, and the combination that would leave a post unattributed is exactly the one somebody eventually tries.
#Guest authors
Guest authors are created in the admin as their own list under Users, one entry per person.
A profile holds a name, a photo, a job title, a biography, a website and a profile page address.
An email address is asked for only so a standard avatar can be pulled in. It is never displayed anywhere on the site.
Every guest gets their own page collecting their posts, the same as a regular author.
#Where the byline appears
Co-authors show wherever the theme displays authorship: on the post itself, and in post listings across the site.
You do not enable the byline separately in each place. Select co-authors on the post and they appear everywhere the theme shows an author.
This integration is licensed with the theme, not on its own.
Integrations are premium functionality for customers running a Pro license of one of our themes. They are written against our themes and expect them, and we cannot support or take responsibility for what one does inside somebody else's theme. See how theme integrations work.
#Common questions
Does a guest author need a WordPress account?
No, and avoiding that is the point of guest authors. A byline is a credit, not a reason to hand somebody a login to your site.
Can I control the order of the names?
Yes. The order you select them in is the order they appear in.
Does a co-author's archive include posts they co-wrote?
Yes. Their page collects everything they are credited on, not only the posts where they are the main author.
A co-author I selected does not appear in the byline
Check the post first: the selection lives in the sidebar field group, and an unsaved post has nothing to show yet.
If the selection is saved and the byline still shows one name, the place you are looking at most likely has its author display switched off in its own settings.
A guest whose profile was unpublished or deleted is also dropped from the byline, rather than printed as a broken name.
What happens to the credits if I remove the integration?
The byline goes back to the single WordPress author, and the stored co-author data stays where it is. Reactivating the integration restores every credit as it was.
#Still stuck
Open a support ticket and say what you tried and where it stopped. Your product, your domain, a screenshot and the exact message you saw are usually enough to settle it in one reply.
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