I’ve been doing a lot of looking into using WordPress as a multi-author website/blog lately. A few of my clients have requested the need to handle (elegantly) multiple authors, so (being fresh on my mind) I feel inclined to share.
One of the coolest plugin combinations I’ve come across recently is using Author Spotlight and Authors Widget in combination with a custom author template to create a really fun way to showcase authors both in the sidebar, on their own page, and on a single page. The first two are easy, but the third one takes a small tweak to get things going.
The easiest way I’ve seen is to add a sidebar widget spot to the single post page with this code:
<ul id=”spotlight”>
<?php /* Widgetized sidebar, if you have the plugin installed. */
if ( !function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) || !dynamic_sidebar(2) ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>
Then, hit up your functions.php and make the necessary changes to add in a second (third, fourth, etc) sidebar:
<?php
if ( function_exists(‘register_sidebars) )
register_sidebars(2,array(
‘before_widget’ => ‘<li id=”%1$s” class=”widget %2$s”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</li>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h2 class=”widgettitle”>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h2>’,
));
?>
Finally, download and install Author Spotlight and drag it to your second sidebar.
You’ll have to do a bit of styling to get things looking nice (like the screenshot below), so here’s what I recommend:
#author_spotlight i a{
display: none;
}
#author_spotlight img{
float: left;
margin-right: 15px;
}
h4#author_name{
display: none;
}
#author_spotlight h2.widgettitle{
background-image: none !important;
padding-left: 0px !important;
}
Special thanks to Aaron, Mark, and Kelly over at The Periscope Group for letting me (aka, they just launched and I’m sending some traffic their way) take a peek inside his CSS code and use his site as an example.