multiauthor
How to Add Multiple Authors (Co-Authors) for Posts in WordPress
September 19th, 2018 in Wordpress |

Do you want to show multiple authors for a post in WordPress? Many websites often have multiple authors working on the same article. For example, on news websites sometimes multiple journalists contribute to a single story. In that case, you may want to give credit to all the authors who worked on the post. In this article, we will show you how to allow multiple authors to be associated with a post in WordPress.

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the Co-Authors Plus plugin.

Next, you need to edit the post or page where you want to credit multiple authors.

On the post edit screen, you will notice the new ‘Authors’ box just below the post editor.

selectauthors

By default, it will show the original author of the post. You can add additional authors by entering their name in the search box below.

The plugin will start showing users as you type. You need to select the user that you want to add as an author by clicking on it.

The selected author name will now appear below the original author name.

multiauthors

You can continue adding more authors as needed. Once you are done, you can save or publish your post.

Showing Multiple Authors On Your WordPress Site

Unfortunately, the plugin does not automatically display multiple authors on your site. For that, you’ll need to edit your theme files.

You’ll need to edit theme files with the code responsible for showing the author name for posts. This could be single.php, content.php, or a template tag in your theme’s functions.php file.

You will be looking for the code with template tag andthe_author_posts_link() you will need to replace it with the following code snippet.

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if ( function_exists( 'coauthors_posts_links' ) ) {
    coauthors_posts_links();
} else {
    the_author_posts_link();
}

Here is how it looked it on our demo website.

multipleauthors

For more examples of template tags, please visit the plugin’s website.

Adding Guest Authors to Your WordPress Site

By default, this plugin can only look up and show registered users on your website. What if you wanted to give credit to guest authors who do not have an account on your WordPress site?

There are multiple ways to accept user submitted posts in WordPress. You can create an account for authors, or you can accept posts directly from the front-end of your website.

Co-Authors Plus offers a simpler workaround for that. It allows you to add guest authors without giving them access to the admin area or writing privileges on your website. Guest authors can send you their posts via email, and you can add them to your WordPress site.

Let’s see how to add guest authors in Co-Authors Plus.

First, you need to head over to Users » Guest Authors page and click on the ‘Add New’ button at the top.

newguestauthor

On the next screen, you need to provide author information such as name, email, website, etc. Once you are done, click on ‘Add new guest author’ button to save your changes.

guestauthordetails

That’s all you have successfully added a guest author.

Now you will be able to select them as the author for posts on your WordPress site, just like you would select registered users.

We hope this article helped you learn how to allow multiple authors to be associated with a post in WordPress.