How To Add Author Information on a WordPress Post

It is always nice to add custom features to enhance the user experience.  One of these enhancements is to add the an author’s bio information to an article he or she has written.  This is particularly useful because when reading a good article the user may be inclined to learn more about the author.

A quick snippet of the author’s information can help users relate to the author as well as help the author promote himself or herself.

Using the_author_meta tag to grab information

In WordPress, each registered user can fill out information about themselves in their profile.  This is found in the Dashboard under Users -> Your Profile.  Some of the meta information fields that are available by default are the following:

• Username
• First name
• Last name
• Nickname
• Email
• Website
• AIM
• Yahoo IM
• Jabber / Google Talk
• Biographical Info

By using the_author_meta tag in your single.php, you are able to pull the information regarding the author.  Of course, you will need all the strings that you can use with the_author_meta tag.  Here is a list of all the strings to use the_author_meta tag:

• user_login
• user_pass
• user_nicename
• user_email
• user_url
• user_registered
• user_activation_key
• user_status
• display_name
• nickname
• first_name
• last_name
• description
• jabber
• aim
• yim
• user_level
• user_firstname
• user_lastname
• user_description
• rich_editing
• comment_shortcuts
• admin_color
• plugins_per_page
• plugins_last_view
• ID

Course, you can read more about the_author_meta tag at WordPress Codex.

Sample Code Snippet of Adding Author Bio to the Post

A quick simple sample is to grab the author’s display name, bio information and website.

<div id="author">
<p>Written by: <?php the_author_meta('display_name'); ?></p>
<p>Quick Bio: <?php the_author_meta('user_description'); ?></p>
<p>Website: <a href="<?php the_author_meta('user_url'); ?>"><?php the_author_meta('user_url'); ?></a>
</div>

Adding the code above into your single.php after the loop, you will be able to display the author information.  You will need to style with CSS.

Adding Gravatar to the Author Bio

To further customize the author info, you may want to add an avatar.  Because gravatar is linked to your email and recognized by all WordPress installation, the only tag you need to grab your avatar icon is the following code:

<?php echo get_avatar (get_the_author_email(), '100'); ?>

The code snippet above is just a function.  Basically, you are calling the function get_avatar and the two parameters following is for the author’s email and the second is the size of the avatar.

Other Guides on Adding Author Bio Information

• Add an author’s bio to WordPress posts – Stranger in a Strange Land
• Displaying Author Pic and Bio in Your WordPress – Gabe Diaz