PublishPress Authors v4.15: Authors Can Belong to Multiple Categories
PublishPress Authors 4.15.0 makes author organization more flexible: an author can now be assigned to more than one author category. This is helpful for sites that group contributors by department, role, region, topic, or any other structure where one person may belong in several places.
Table of Contents
Feature highlights
- Multiple categories: Assign the same author to more than one author category so contributor lists and author displays can better reflect real team structures. This is a setting you can enable called “Allow authors in multiple categories:”
- Custom hidden author page message: A new setting lets you change the “post not found for the author” text shown when author pages are hidden.
- Automatic PublishPress Permissions integration: Sites using PublishPress Permissions should get the Authors integration without needing to run it manually.
To use the new category behavior, edit an author and select more than one author category wherever author categories are managed on your site. If your site hides author archive pages, review the new message setting in the Authors settings area so visitors see wording that matches your site.
Other improvements and fixes
This release also includes several fixes that improve privacy, admin safety, and daily reliability.
- Better profile syncing: Updating WordPress user information now updates the related author profile more reliably.
- Author box separator fix: Author box separators now work across categories, not only for users within the same category.
- Translation fix: Select2 interface strings now display translated text correctly where translations are available.
- REST API privacy: Author user email addresses are now hidden from REST API output by default.
- Admin and AJAX hardening: Several author list, author category reorder, author box preview, and template actions now include stronger permission checks and safer output handling.
- Dependency updates: Several JavaScript development dependencies were updated, including fixes from upstream security advisories.
Because this version includes security related hardening for AJAX and REST API behavior, it is a good update for any site that displays author boxes, manages author categories, or exposes author data through the WordPress REST API.
For developers
Developers using the REST API should note that author user email fields are hidden by default in this release, and the post authors REST callback now handles configured fields more accurately.
The release also updates build and test dependencies such as js-cookie, tmp, qs, express, fast-uri, axios, Babel tooling, and ip-address, and adds workflow support for Dependabot alert triage.
The Best Author Profile Plugin for WordPress
The PublishPress Authors plugin allows you to create beautiful profiles for your site’s authors. You can add social media links, recent posts, custom layouts and much more.
