Setup Multi Author Blog – Display Profiles & Bio in Blog Posts

Nowadays it has become a trend of running Multi-Authored Blogs and this is because working in a team is better than running as a individual. Overall everyone puts in their efforts and the final results are shared easily among the team. Creating a Multi Authored Blog is a very easy job because Wordpress allows you to easily allow others sign-up with your blog and with the different type of user levels you can assign them their profiles. Here is a small tutorial for the same.

• User Registration : The first and foremost step would be allowing the users or authors to register on your blog. Hence you need to visit the Wp-Admin > Settings > General section and allow others to Register with the New Role of the users be assigned to ‘Subscribers’.

  

  All the authors have to visit the www.yourblog.com/wp-admin section and click on the Register Button and proceed with the signup form. Once this is done, you will find the whole list of members under Wp-Admin > Users > Authors & Users section. Here you need to ‘edit’ the Username and change the Role from ‘Subscriber’ to ‘Editor’ following which the new member can edit different posts and also create new posts and publish them.

  

  Once the role for the new member is assigned, you need to request them to edit their bio section and update it with a description information which would be displayed on the Profile Page and also at the end of the blog posts.

• Displaying Author Name : The next step would be displaying the Author Name on the Home Page, Single Blog Posts, Category Pages etc and for this you need to tweak the theme files. Under the Appearance > Editor > single.php file, you need to find the title code and below that add the following code. You can easily tweak this and any related text before or after the code.
  

  Written by <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?>

  Make sure that you add the above code in all the files wherever you want the profile link to be displayed.

• Displaying Author profile : This is a very useful option in wordpress if you implement it in the right way, because it allows you to display a small bio of the author along with his photo at the end of the blog posts or any location which you specify in the single post file. You need to add the following code first in the stylesheet file located at style.php

  .author{
background: #ececec;
border:1px solid #cccccc;
font-weight: bold;
padding: 5px;
margin-top:10px;
margin-bottom:10px;
}
.avatar {
float: left;
width: 80px;
height: 80px;
}
  Next the following code should be added in the single.php file which will enable you to display the author profile within the articles written by them. It will find the article writer based on the email address and display the information.

  <div class="author">
  <?php
  $author_email = get_the_author_email();
  echo get_avatar($author_email, '80', 'avatar');
  ?>
  <?php the_author_description(); ?>
  </div>

Adsense Revenue Sharing : When you have got co-authors in your blog, and you want to share the adsense revenue made by the blog on the basis of the efforts made by each Editor, then adsense revenue sharing is one of the best plugins you should use. It allows you to easily manage different ad slots, and shows advertisements from each Publisher ID in the articles written by respective authors. If the blog topics are handled by different editors, then you can use the option of showing ads based on category.

• Displaying List of Author’s : The final step would be displaying a list of all the writers & authors of the blog in the sidebar. For this you need to edit the sidebar.php file and add the following function code to the file and save it. This would show the whole list of authors in a vertical format with names one below the other, normally in alphabetical order.
  

  <?php wp_list_authors(); ?>

Do read our Wordpress Security Guide which can help you in keeping your blog secured.