Simple Author Box | The Blog Pros

June 9, 2020

Write On! 12 Best Multi-author Plugins for WordPress

Multi-author blogs are a great way to attract readers by offering an array of different viewpoints, topics, and voices. They can also become disorganized chaos if you don’t have a good system of maintaining posts, scheduling, author payments, and everything else that comes with running a multi-author blog on WordPress.

Luckily, with some helpful plugins and solid advice, your site can run a multi-author blog smoothly and efficiently.

I’ll be going over:

Why have a multi-author blog
How multi-author plugins can help
12 Best Multi-Author Plugins
Tips for managing a multi-author blog

And plenty more!

If you haven’t started a multi-author blog and are considering it, or if you have one already established on WordPress and it needs some modifications, this post will show you what needs to be done, how to do it, and what it takes to keep it maintained.

Forminator, Dev Man, and Hummingbird all working on a multi-author site. It should be super.

You’ll then have happy authors and happy readers that will return multi-ple times.

Why Have a Multi-author Blog?

If you’re not familiar with multi-author blogs, or if you are but never considered why to have one, this will help shed some light on them.

There are many reasons to have one. Need an example? You’re on one right now!

WPMU DEV puts great emphasis on our blog. It’s a platform for numerous authors, experts, and our whole team here.

We cover a wide scope of WordPress topics, ideas, news, reviews, lists, and tutorials that aim to be informational, useful, and entertaining for our visitors, members, and blog readers.

This blog has helped establish our brand and our voice.

As well as helping to establish your brand, a multi-author blog can provide you with regular updates, different viewpoints, and help you cover more topics.

Multi-author blogs can also bring your team together, as writers can learn from each other and work towards a common goal of delivering the best darn content possible.

It can also become a community for your readers with their comments, perspective, and insight.

Plus, multi-author blogs are a good segue to other things.

For example, as our team shares information about our plugins, hosting, support, and upcoming features, this collaborative effort leads to new customers for our membership and hosting, increased activity in our forums, ideas for improving our products and services with new features, and a whole lot more.

With a multi-author site, you can publish an ongoing stream of articles about your products and services, tutorials and announcements about their features and benefits, and in return, start generating income.

Excited yet? I thought so.

However, before launching your multi-author blog, there are…

A Few Things to Consider

As you can see, multi-author blogs have tons of benefits. But, they’re similar to owning — let’s say — a cute kitten. You love your new furry friend, but it requires a litter box, food, fuzzy toys, healthcare, and more. Multi-author blogs are similar (except for the spay or neutered part).

With a multi-author blog, you may need to address challenges like:

More editing: Nobody wants to comb through bad grammar, typos, and awful sentence structure when reading a blog. So, if you have writers that aren’t editors, you may have to wrangle editing yourself or appoint someone to it (which, as you’ll see later, is highly recommended). It’s a bit more challenging than keeping just yourself edited. (Editor’s note: I agree!)
Payments: Depending on how your operations run, you may have to pay authors. Of course, if they deliver quality content, it’s well worth it (any author needs to be paid well). Financially though, make sure you’re prepared to do so if your situation calls for it.
Many voices: I mentioned that having many voices is beneficial, however, it can also be detrimental. If your audience only wants to hear from you, then having a multi-author site might not be a good thing. Also, you may have some writers that just don’t match the tone of your blog.
Lose a personal connection: This goes hand-in-hand with having many voices. You don’t want to lose a personal connection with your readers if the WordPress site is strictly about you. Be careful not to disconnect with your audience when you feature numerous authors.

It’s typically best to establish a multi-author blog right from the beginning. If you don’t, you can still create one. Just be sure to take measures of letting your audience know. You can do this by announcing that it’s coming, or slowly start including other authors.

As long as you’re transparent with your audience and they know what to expect, you should be fine.

Your blog will then be manageable and won’t stink (like a dirty litter box).

Why Use a Multi-author Plugin?

Plugins. They are the answer to all of life’s problems, right? Well, at least when it comes to WordPress.

Multi-author plugins make your blog run more smoothly, clearly, and keep it organized. Rather than, for example, creating an author list widget on your own, there is a plugin for that (I’ll be showing you soon).

In general, using plugins can help to make running a multi-author blog easier. It can also prevent challenges by:

Making it clear who the author (and feature the author in an attractive way too!)
Keeping design consistency
Allowing for more information regarding author bios, links, etc.
Improving organization (e.g. editorial calendar)
Keeping track of payments
Improving general areas of WordPress like security, opt-in forms, and social media

12 Multi-author Plugins

Now that we’ve covered some of the pros and cons of running a multi-author WordPress site, let’s take a look at 12 multi-author plugins that can really help you out in areas like functionality, design, communication, organization, payments, and more:

1. Simple Author Box

Simple Author Box is a quick way to add an attractive author box that can include social links, the author’s gravatar, email, and more. You can easily customize almost every aspect of the box to include exactly what you want.

The plugin makes it easy to adjust everything about your bio box. All the different settings and features are really helpful to have.

simple author box example. — Example of an author box I created.

You can see in my example I created a custom avatar, included a bio, and mentioned my name.

One thing to consider about this plugin is that to allow guest authors and co-authors, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro version.

Currently, the cost is $499 per year for an Agency account, $69 a year for a Trio account, and $29 per year for a Mono account. Beyond having an upgraded account for multi-authors, you’ll be able to change box positions, linking to websites, and more.

They include various features, as seen below:

Simple author box pricing. — Features with an upgraded account.

Click here for more information and details about an upgraded account.

For simplicity and a fair price, the Simple Author Box is a great way to display each author in a professional way.

Also, for additional information on author box plugins, be sure to read our article all about them.

2. Edit Flow

Edit Flow is an amazing all-in-one work area for organizing your entire editorial team directly in WordPress. Once installed, you have access to a content calendar, editorial comments, budgets, user groups, and more.

It’s convenient how all the functions are displayed in one area directly in your WordPress admin. You can see all of the impressive features that can be edited and configured in this area, such as notifications, story budgets, user groups, and editorial comments.

A look at the Edit Flow dashboard and all of the options.

The plugin is free to use and there are no upgrades needed to organize your multi-author blog.

Edit flow calendar — Example of the calendar area where I set up a post that is scheduled.

Beyond WordPress.org, they also have a website where you can learn more about all that Edit Flow can accomplish.

With a solid 4-star rating and over 10K active installations, it might be a fantastic fit for your organizational multi-author needs and worth checking out.

3. Co-Authors Plus

Co-Authors Plus was created to assign multiple bylines to posts and pages. Co-authored posts will appear on a co-author archive page and also in their feed. You can create a guest author profile and also allow co-authors to edit unpublished posts.

The authors can be arranged by a simple drag-and-drop process. This allows you to feature the main author on top and a secondary author(s) below. They then appear in the post with their name and avatar.

co-authors plus example. — You can add multiple authors and co-authors to arrange accordingly.

It can be used for multisite, however, guest authors will exist on a site by site basis.

This very simple and free plugin is good for arranging the order of any authors that contribute to a post.

4. Post Status Notifier Lite

Post Status Notifier Lite is a system for getting notified when one of your contributors submits a new post for a revision or an editor publishes a new one. It also supports custom taxonomies, like categories and tags that other plugins are using.

An example of the area to create a new rule for posts.

There are rules you can set up that will send a notification when a new post gets submitted for review. You can also set up rules that send an email to the author of a post when it becomes published.

This plugin is free to use, however, the PRO version comes with advanced features like custom notification rules, individual email texts, and HTML emails. The price range is $26 to $115, depending on what type of license you’d like to purchase.

It’s an option to keep tabs on any changes, publications, and workflow with posts.

5. Post Pay Counter Stats

Post Pay Counter Stats is a way to simply calculate and handle authors’ pay by displaying payment, comments, the date, and more in one area. It’s specifically made for multi-author blogs.

You can set up the payment criteria and let the plugin post-payment to your authors. It’s awesome for implementing a revenue-sharing system and paid model for your website.

This plugin has a pay per post, word, visit, image, and comment feature. Also, there are sortable stats, personalized user settings, and customizable permissions to prevent your users from seeing stats.

post payment settings. — Example of some counting and personalized settings.

They do have a PRO version that includes analytics visits payment, Adsense revenues sharing, payments management, and PayPal payments. The basic package starts at around $38 per year to around $93 (prices are in Euros and subject to change).

If you have a payroll or are profiting off of your blog, this plugin may do the trick to help keep your payments in check.

6. Author Avatars List/Block

Author Avatars List/Block makes it a cinch to display lists of user avatars that are grouped by user roles. You can also insert single avatars for blog users or any email address into a post or page.

It can be inserted into your sidebar via widget or into posts and pages with shortcodes.

Setting up the author’s avatar as a widget.

The customization options are easy to adjust. It’s a simplistic plugin, but great for displaying avatars on a WordPress multi-author site.

author avatars live example. — A view of my avatar (yes, I’m lounging at the pool).

If you have multiple authors, it’s an attractive way to feature them and put a face directly out there with the name.

For additional ways to show all of your authors together, check out our article on the topic.

7. PublishPress Revisions

PublishPress Revisions lets your users submit change requests for published posts, which is great for any multi-author site. Any user you have can update posts using the WordPress editor, but any changes they make will not be published automatically. Instead, they’re kept as “pending revision” that any editor can approve or reject.

Once you have PublishPress activated, all published posts will give you the option to Save Revision.

Where the Save Revision button is on a blog post.

It will then be added to a queue, where it can easily be accessed.

It has impressive features, such as email notifications for revisions, revision permissions, frontend moderation of revisions, scheduled revisions, and more.

You will need to upgrade to a PRO version from $59 to $199 per year, to use it for multi-author. The upgrade also includes additional features, such as advanced custom fields, WooCommerce compatibility, Yoast SEO compatibility, and support.

They have their own dedicated website devoted to PublishPress that will help answer any question you may have. For example, you can find out how to create revisions or compare revisions.

This is an efficient plugin to help organize workflow, editing, and — of course — keep tabs on revisions.

8. User Submitted Posts

User Submitted Posts is a plugin for user-generation. It enables visitors to submit posts from the frontend of your WordPress site.

It’s an extremely easy to use plugin. You simply add a shortcode to any post, page, or widget, and then that will let your visitors submit posts and upload images.

It includes a fast & secure post submission form, tags to display submitted post content, and automatically displays all submitted content on the frontend.

You can edit the form as much as you’d like. Then, have it displayed accordingly.

Form example. — Example of the form I created.

They also have a PRO version that lets you develop auto-display images, registration forms, and allows users to upload videos. Prices start at $45 to $550, depending on use and how many sites you have.

This simple to use plugin is nice for allowing guest posts and letting your audience engage directly with your site.

9. WP User Frontend

WP User Frontend is a frontend builder plugin that includes a frontend dashboard, frontend editor & publishing, and frontend uploader for user profiles, post submissions, and memberships.

Users can easily make new posts and edit their profiles all from the site frontend, which prevents them from any need to enter the backend admin panel to perform any action.

These actions are done by the editor, or admin, creating a drag and drop form that, when published, is available on the frontend.

A custom form I created allowing users to create a post.

Once the form is created, it’s compiled into an easy to access list in the WordPress admin. The shortcode for the form is available and can be used in any post, page, or widget.

You can also enable guests to post from your site frontend without registering, enable certain user roles, submit and update anything from the frontend, and more.

They also offer a PRO version that starts at $49 to $159 per year that has features such as private messaging, Paid Membership Pro, reports, and live chat support.

This well-developed plugin is a great attribute for any multi-author WordPress site.

10. Pre-Publish Checklist

Pre-Publish Checklist is a simple way to ensure your page or post is ready to go live. It lets you create a checklist that you wish to maintain for every post type on your WordPress site.

This plugin is especially perfect for multi-author so that your authors can check-off everything for their posts — and any editor can, too.

The key features are managed checklists for your pages & posts, personalized checklists, and an overview of the progress of posts and pages.

The checklist shows up within a metabox on the post or page edit page.

If all of the items on the checklist are not completed, you can create a message that will be displayed when they hit the publish button.

Prepublish notification. — Uh-oh. Looks like not everything was checked off the list.

If you’re looking for quality control with your post, this is a perfect plugin to ensure all the boxes are ticked and any author’s post is ready to be published.

11. Editorial Calendar

Editorial Calendar is a way to keep track of drafts, scheduled posts, and published articles for your multi-author site. You can easily drag and drop to move posts around, edit posts by clicking on them on the calendar, and manage your entire WordPress blog.

It’s simple to get to the calendar by clicking on Posts and then Calendar in the WordPress admin.

The main features are:

Capability to see all of your posts and when they’ll be posted
Drag and drop changes to post dates
Able to manage drafts with their drafts drawer
Check the status of posts
Multi-author friendly

An example I set up for a pending post and scheduled post.

It’s a very impressive free and easy to use plugin that really makes keeping tabs on posts simple and accessible. It’s one of those plugins that will make you wonder how you’ve lived without it if you have a multi-author website.

12. User Blocker

User Blocker provides the ability for admin to block or unblock user accounts in a quick and effortless way. You can specify if a user is blocked for a certain amount of time or permanently. Then, when that blocked user tries to log in, they’ll be welcomed with a friendly error message on the login screen.

You can always unblock accounts at any time. Admin always has access to view blocked accounts and can edit.

Where blocked users are located in the WordPress admin.

It’s a free plugin that combats spam and also will remove a user from a specific role on a multi-author site.

5 Tips for Managing a Multi-author WordPress Site

We now have a nice foundation for a multi-author site, with reasons to have one, plugins to enhance it, and more. So, you launch your very own multi-author site. Yippee! Now what?

Beyond plugins, here are some tips to keeping it managed well and running like a well-oiled multi-author machine:

1. Create a Contributors Guidelines Page: You should be open to being pitched by amazing writers. Any opportunity for talent that can help your blog shouldn’t be dismissed. If you create a good writer’s guideline, it will help the process by guiding the writers in the right direction on what to pitch, how to do it, and how to submit.

2. Work Ahead: It’s a good idea to stay ahead of the game. That’s especially true when you have posts that need to be published regularly. The further you work ahead the better. That way if something comes up (e.g. one of your writer’s falls ill), you’ll be prepared with the material.

Plus, you want to have ample time to give feedback, gather illustrations/visuals, and revisions.

In general, nobody is a huge fan of last-minute edits and details right before publication, so working ahead can alleviate a lot of that stress (and headache).

3. Assign an Editor: Depending on the size of your blog and the number of posts being published, one editor might be all you need. However, as it grows, you may need several more. Either way, it’s essential to have a go-to editor to make the final call on edits, revisions, and ensure the quality of the posts are up to par.

Without an editor, a lot can slip through the cracks. Sometimes it takes a second pair of eyes for typos, grammar, suggestions, and more. (Editor’s note: I agree!)

4. Have a Database for Writers: A writer database helps keep track of writers who have contacted you about contributing, current writers, and what they’ve written, contact information, and assignments.

You don’t need to have anything fancy in regards to this. A spreadsheet or whatever method works best for you will do the trick.

5. Communicate Well: Communication is key when it comes to having (and maintaining) good content on a multi-author blog. The better the communication, the better the blog.

It’s essential that all the writers are on the same page.

Also, be professional. Nobody wants to have a jerk at the helm of a multi-site blog, so communicate friendly, professionally, and just be cool. Don’t be the person that nobody wants to communicate with due to a poor attitude.

That’s a Writer’s Wrap

With different viewpoints, topics, ideas, and features, a multi-author blog can be a great contribution to the WordPress community. Hey, we have ours here at WPMU DEV — and you can, too!

It can also be a great way to bring in income, create a fanbase, get users excited about your brand, and so much more.

With the help of plugins, knowledge, and a handful of good writers, there’s always room in the WordPress world for emerging multi-author blogs to break-through and become an essential read for thousands (or millions) of readers.

And hopefully, now you know how to do it write.

May 25, 2020

9 Top Free WordPress Author Bio Box Plugins

Drawing attention to the author or authors on your site may be a key piece of your overall strategy. Perhaps you’re trying to establish a more personal tone. Perhaps you’re trying to build a reputation. Perhaps you’re trying to attract quality contributors. These are but a few potential reasons why you might want to make sure your readers connect the content with the person writing it.

Out of the box, WordPress provides users with a biographical info section in the User Profile screen where post authors and site users or members can add information about themselves.

The default WordPress User Profile author bio box is not the be-all and the end-all of bio boxes.

Depending on your theme and how its settings are configured, information about the author can display in Post author archives…

Post Author Archive Page — Not happy with your post author archive page? You can have it as you like it…with plugins! (Theme: WordPress Twenty Twenty)

And at the end of every post…

WordPress Twenty Twenty Theme - Post Author Bio — A post author bio at the end of every post? I guess you can have too much of a good thing!

With some WordPress themes, however, you may find that all that glitters is not gold.

For example, you might want an author box that lifts your writers above the ground with cheerful thoughts and links to their social profiles, and discover that, while you love your theme with a love that shall not die, you can’t customize its bio boxes to your heart’s content.

So, do your current author boxes perform as well as they could? Or are they a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions? If you’re looking to liven up your author profiles, then one of the plugins below may just do the trick.

So, without further ado…

1. Simple Author Box
Simple Author Box may have started out as a way to create simple and beautiful minimalistic design for author bio boxes without having to break into the code, but since being taken over by WebFactory Ltd, the plugin now offers a huge range of customization options for your author bio box.

Simple Author Box settings screen.

This plugin gives you the ability to easily customize everything about your bio box. The range of settings and options is quite impressive.

For starters, you can edit your author bio directly from the plugin’s settings screen, add/edit social media icons, and even set up a custom gravatar.

Tabbed sections offer everything from toggle settings that let you do things like display a bio box anywhere on your site using a shortcode or code snippet, show author email address, or hide various elements and features, to customizing its appearance, changing different colors of elements like author name, borders, backgrounds, etc., and then make it stand out from the rest of your site’s content using unique typography styles.

You can also preview changes to your bio box in real-time while you play with the settings.

Extemporize your inner bard with Simple Author Box’s settings and live preview feature.

Beware when tapping into the suite power of this plugin’s sweet customizable options. Deceive not thy sweet self into thinking that having complete control of your bio box designs will make thee a cutting-edge bio box designer.

“Could beauty have better commerce than with honesty?” Create eye-catching bio boxes with Simple Author Box plugin.

The free version of Simple Author Box incorporates mobile responsiveness, a Gutenberg block, and is fully customizable to match your existing theme design.

Upgrade to Pro for advanced features like changing author box position in the content, linking the author’s name to their website or page, adding author avatar hover effects and changing image position, social icons settings, color palette and font and font sizes for additional elements, as well as enabling guest authors and co-authors, and adding widgets to your site.

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2. Branda
If you’re looking to add feature-rich author boxes that blend in perfectly with your website or blog, try our WordPress white labeling plugin Branda.

Branda is our full white label solution for WordPress, so it lets you customize your site’s front-end and back-end, including author boxes.

Branda’s author box settings screen is found in the Front-End section of the plugin’s customization settings menu.

Branda takes care of every aspect of your author box design from configuring design options, visibility, and elements of the author box, to customizing author and social media profiles, colors, avatars, etc. You can also use custom CSS.

“This brand[a] she quenched in a cool well…” to thine own site be true.
Branda is the only premium and 100% free white label plugin for WordPress. So, if you’re looking to customize a whole lot more than just author boxes on your site, with Branda, all the world’s your stage.

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3. WP Post Author
WP Post Author by AF Themes is another great plugin you can use to add an author bio box with custom settings to your WordPress site.

The plugin offers a widget and shortcode designed to be used in WordPress single post author and author pages, and custom styling can be added through a CSS box.

WP Post Author bio box plugin settings screen.

Although this plugin may have fewer customization options than the previous plugin, it still offers an impressive range of useful options and settings for tweaking your site’s author bio boxes styling.

WP Post Author bio box example. Simple, plain bio box, I do love thee so!

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4. Author Bio Box
If all you need is a simple plugin that will make your site’s author bio boxes stand out from the content, the Author Bio Box plugin offers a one-page settings screen with colorful design and border styling options.

Author Bio Box plugin settings screen.

The plugin also gives you the choice of displaying author bio boxes only in posts, the home page and posts, or none.

There are no tricks in this plain and simple Author Bio Box.

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5. Starbox
Starbox offers a fairly functional free version, with various toggle and dropdown options, plus customizable fields for adding author information.

Starbox author box plugin settings screen.

Fields are limited in the free version, but you have complete control and many more options to choose from when you buy the Starbox PRO premium version of the plugin.

The free Starbox plugin aims to make it as easy as possible to add attractive author boxes to your website. Activating the plugin adds additional fields to the default WordPress user profile page allowing your users to enter links to their Facebook and Twitter social media profiles, submit their job title, company name, company URL, as well as the default biographical info.

The plugin’s settings let you choose whether to activate the author boxes on posts and/or pages, display the box before, after, or before and after the post content, and more. The free version provides six themes for styling the author boxes on your site. Depending on your chosen theme, the author box may include a latest posts tab. You can also quickly change the size of the text used to display the name and author bio, independently from each other. A handy preview panel lets you see how your choices will display in real-time.

“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny” but Starbox can definitely help authors become masters of their own fate.

While most author box plugins rely on Gravatar to display your profile picture, Starbox also gives you the option of uploading an image directly to your user profile page. Through the individual user profile pages, users can choose from one of the available themes, and set the author box position themselves.

Author boxes can also be manually inserted directly into posts, pages, and the sidebar areas of your website by using the included shortcodes. This makes it easy to add multiple author boxes to a single post or page.

This author box plugin is packed with useful features, making it a popular and highly recommended choice. The premium version of Starbox gives you the ability to add links to more social media websites and also offers a number of themes to choose from, incorporating HTML5. However, the free version is more than capable of displaying professional author bio boxes on your WordPress website.

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6. About Author
With the About Author author bio box plugin, you must first create a shortcode that includes your choice of template style and the information you want to include in your template, and then you configure your author settings and select the template you have created.

About Author plugin settings screen.

This can feel a little confusing at first, but it gives you the option of configuring and using multiple post author templates throughout your site, including posts, pages, sidebars, etc.

“Let me be that I am and seek not to alter me.” But you can alter this bio box using shortcodes and templates.

With the free version, you can create functional author bio boxes with customizable font, color, and social media options but you are limited to two template styles, two profile image layouts, and a few other restrictions. The Pro version gives you 10 design author templates, more profile image layouts, more social media settings, profile header backgrounds, multiple author options for images, widgets, and shortcodes, responsive design, and more.

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7. Molongui Authorship
The plugin developers claim that Molongui Authorship “provides you all the missing features you might need to properly manage and credit all the contributors to your site.”

This may not be an exaggerated claim. This comprehensive and feature-rich author box plugin is suitable for all types of WordPress sites, especially sites featuring multi-authors, co-authors, and guest authors.

The plugin’s settings screen has a number of tabs for configuring and customizing a wide range of options from layouts, templates, typography, avatars, and social media icons, to SEO metadata, byline modifiers, conditional logic, shortcodes, and more. It also integrates with the WordPress Theme Customizer.

Molongui Authorship plugin settings screen.

Choose the free version of the plugin if you just want to display an enhanced author box on your site. If your strategy depends on attracting content authors or promoting multi-authoring, guest authoring, or co-authoring on your site, then the premium version unlocks a range of additional elements and advanced customization features (like shortcodes and the ability to make links ‘nofollow’) that will let you dive deep under the hood to tinker, tweak, and finetune your author bio box settings to your heart’s content.

“O Romeo, wherefore art thou?” Maybe try searching in the house of Molongui.

The premium version also includes export/import settings tools, REST API, and access to premium support (in case you run into a tragedy).

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8. Co-Authors Plus
Co-Authors Plus is another plugin you can install if you collaborate with multiple authors on the same post and need an easy way to give all authors credit.

Co-Authors Plus isn’t an ‘author bio box’ plugin in the sense that it helps you define the design and structure of author bio elements. Instead, this plugin makes it simple to credit more than one person for the creation of an article. As such, this plugin is great if you plan to publish articles with two or more authors and want to give both equal credit for their contributions.

Need to add multiple authors to your posts? Co-authors plus lets a wavering multitude play upon it.

The plugin upgrades the core authors meta box, which is displayed on the edit post and page screens. This lets you search for existing users on your blog and then add them as a co-author for the post or page you are working on. You can drag and drop the authors that have been added to a post in order to change the order their bio boxes are displayed in when your post is published.

When you assign a co-author to a post or page, they can then edit that page according to their WordPress user role settings.

Another interesting feature of this plugin is the ability to add bylines without having to create a user account for each author. This makes it easy to create guest author accounts, allows you to credit guest posters by giving them a byline, and eliminates the need to create an actual user account for one-time authors who submit content for your WordPress site or blog.

Note: To display multiple bio boxes on a single post, you will need to manually add some code to your theme’s templates files, so bear this in mind before downloading and installing this plugin. If you don’t mind messing with code, there is helpful documentation on the plugin’s site to help you achieve this without drama.

Also, if you are using the Genesis theme framework on your website, then you will want to install the Genesis Co-Authors Plus plugin. This free tool works alongside this plugin, enabling support for multiple author boxes on a single post.

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9. Meks Smart Author Widget
Meks Smart Author Widget lets you display your author/user profile info inside a WordPress widget.

Meks Smart Author Widget settings.

The widget provides a range of flexible display options, including custom avatar size, linking avatar image and user display name to author archive page (you can also override the author link URL and link to any page or URL you like), and a smart feature that can auto-detect and display the current post author on single post and author templates.

“Sit by my side, and let the world slip…” Display thy author info on the sidebar[d].

Note: This plugin provides only an author box widget. To display the author info on a widgetized area of your site (e.g. your sidebar) and within your posts/pages, we recommend installing both this plugin and one of the other plugins listed in this post.

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Hiding the Original Author Box

Many themes already include an author box, and if this is your case, then you will probably find that the plugins above add a second author box to your pages.

This was the case when I tried creating this post using the WordPress Twenty Twenty theme.

Twenty-twenty theme with duplicated author boxes. — Yiikes… the Twenty Twenty theme creates double, double toil and trouble!

So, I used a theme called Newsphere instead from AF Themes to create this tutorial.

Newsphere Theme for WordPress by AF Themes — One author box only … now, Newsphere is the winner of dis content!

Of course, you don’t want two author boxes displaying throughout your site, so in order to remove the original author box, you will need to dig into your code a little.

As always, if you’re making changes to your theme, it’s better to use a child theme.

In order to remove the default author box for your theme, you will need to find out where the code is located. Most often author boxes will show up on your single post pages, and so you will want to check your single.php file and search around for the code that pulls in your author box.

In many themes, however, the single.php pulls in other files, and the code you need will be in one of those other files.

For example, when searching for themes that I could use for testing, I looked at the WordPress Twenty Twenty theme. I didn’t find information about my author box, but I found that the singular.php file (normally single.php in most themes) pulls in a file called content, which looked like what I wanted.

Twenty Twenty: Singular Template (singular.php) — “O single.php-soled jest, solely singular.php for the singleness.”

I then went to the content.php file and tracked down the code that was displaying my author box.

Depending on the theme, this could be just a little bit or a lot of code. With the Twenty Twenty theme, it was just a little bit of code.

Twenty Twenty: content.php template file — “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!”

I could simply delete that code. (Again, remember that using a child theme is best. You could just copy the original content.php file into your child theme and then delete the part you need to delete.)

Here’s the code I would want to delete in the Twenty Twelve theme.

Author bio code in content.php file — “You can take him and cut him out”…

Instead of deleting the code, however, another way to do it is to simply comment out that portion of the code. You can do this as follows:


<?php
/*

…code…

*/
?>

Here’s an example:

Section of commented out code from content.php template. — This better work…I’m all commented out!

This worked. Now, the Twenty Twenty theme displays just one author bio box … the one we have added via the plugin.

Twenty Twenty theme with a single author bio box displayed. — Twenty Twenty theme now displays only one author bio box. All’s well that ends well.

And that’s it. If you’d like to spice up your author profiles, methinks one of the above plugins should work out for you – making your bios stand out a little more and hooking these up to the authors’ social profiles at the same time. Try them. You may love all, trust a few, and do wrong to none.