What’s New in PublishPress Authors 3.11?

Written by Steve Burge on January 25, 2021.

PublishPress Authors allows you to show an author box at the end of your posts. This box can display just one author, multiple authors, and even guest authors.

PublishPress Authors 3.11 is now available with several new features and improvements.

Single and Plural words for Authors

The most noticeable new feature allows you to choose the single and plural word for authors. In the image below, visitors will see “Author” if only one user is attached to a post, or “Authors” if there are multiple. This box is also available in the Post Authors widget.

REST API integration

You can now get author information via the WordPress API. This is a useful step that allows you to integrate PublishPress Authors with other plugins.

We're going to take advantage of this to build some integrations with PublishPress Blocks.

You can see the new API integration at a link such as this one. The content of the API looks like this:

"authors:[{"term_id":2866,"user_id":2,"is_guest":0,"slug":"steve","display_name":"Steve Burge"}]

Here's that same information in a more readable format:

"authors": [
  {
    "term_id": 2866,
    "user_id": 2,
    "is_guest": 0,
    "slug": "stevee",
    "display_name": "Steve Burge"
  },
]

Languages

Authors now arrives with Italian and Portuguese translations.

Developer Tools

You can now block PublishPress Authors from loading any CSS on the frontend of your site.

You can deactivate the styles defining a constant in your wp-config.php file:

define('PUBLISHPRESS_AUTHORS_LOAD_STYLE_IN_FRONTEND', false);

Or you can add a filter to the functions.php file:

add_filter('publishpress_authors_load_style_in_frontend', function($loadStyle) {
  return false;
});

Both of these approaches will stop the multiple-authors-widget.css file from loading and allow you to use your own CSS.

There's also a new action you can use to programmatically add authors to posts:

publishpress_authors_set_post_authors

Get PublishPress Authors

You can get the Free version of PublishPress Authors from WordPress.org.

The Pro version enables you to add custom fields and build custom layouts for your users. You can get the Pro version as a PublishPress member.