Customising the author.php in WordPress

I have now edited the files so it works fine with wordpress 3.2.

I have also updated the file to display the comments excerpts rather than the full comment as it looks a bit better and more controlled.

You can also set the number of comments to show in the comment call function.

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There may be a css conflict with some themes. This can easily be solved by taking a copy of your header.php file and adding the author page tab css to that rather than your main css file. You then need to save the new header.php file as header-author.php and that way the css will only be called for the author.php file.

Customise the author page in WordPress.

Most of my web sites use the default WordPress theme of Twenty Ten – usually as a child theme – and those which are not will be updated over the coming months. The main reason for using Twenty Ten is that plugin developers tend to test their mods using this theme and you are less likely to get conflicts.

Twenty Ten is a basic theme but it’s a great skeleton on which to build. One of the pages which could be a really useful tool is the author archives which comes with the twenty ten theme as author.php. In it’s default form it just show a small author bio box at the top and following it is a list of blog posts by the author. It does the job as an archive but is it really of any use to the reader or indeed the author?

Advanced author profile page in WordPress.

A little bit of adapting can make the author.php page a really powerful author profile page. Just check my profile page which is a customisation of author.php. With a little bit of coding the page becomes tabbed with three sections – a real author bio section, a recent blog listing tab and a comment listing tab.

You can see it in action by visiting Wildlife News and clicking on one of the profiles in the contibuters section.

The author bio also becomes much more enhanced which gives your readers a chance to learn a lot more about your contributors.

Of course not everyone is up to coding so I’ve put together an example file for you to purchase and download. You will need to do a bit of cutting and pasting on a couple of files but all the java-script and calls on the author.php file has been done for you.

Making use of plugins for developing author.php.

There are a couple of pre-requisite WordPress plugins that this code takes advantage of and you will need to install. These are:

• User Photo
• Register Plus Redux

Make sure you follow the read me file in the package after you have downloaded and unzipped it as it tells you which settings and fields you need for the author.php to display that customisations correctly.

What does this customised author.php file do? Because I’m going to be adapting the author.php file on this site to my own personalisation it may not be exactly what you get in this file. What you get here is:

Three tabs – the author bio, the list of blog posts and the list of recent comments.

Advanced author bio and tabbed author page for WordPress.

In the author bio section it will display the usual WordPress author box at the top,  it will then display the authors;

• email
• website
• twitter
• facebook
• occupation
• location
• enhanced bio

You will have the option of installing a very basic toolbar in the editing section of author profiles to help your author format their enhanced bio section. It is a very basic toolbar though if you want a full tinymce tool bar you’ll need to sort that out yourself.

The tabs in this version of author.php is operated using the domtab java-script. If the browser accessing your WordPress author page does not support java-script then the tabs will depreciated to named anchors. This means all the contents will show on the page and there will be internal page links to get to the different sections.

Having a more substantial author archive page is really important for multi author blogs as it’s allows your web visitors to find out more about  -and track – their favourite authors.

works on wp 3.2.x

Add an enhanced wordpress author page for £5.00