Easily Design Author Boxes With This New Feature

PublishPress Authors 3.30 is available now and it has major improvements to the “Author Boxes” feature. This feature allows you to show author profiles under posts and in other areas of your site.

“Author Boxes” now offers a live preview, so you can see the design of each Author Box before making it live. And there are now hundreds of new options, so you can customize every aspect of the author profiles.

The “Author Boxes” feature provides five default layouts called “Boxed”, “Centered”, “Inline”, “Inline with Avatars” and “Simple List”. You can see these five layouts in the screenshot below. You can use these layouts, customize them, or click “New Author Box” and create your own layouts.

If you edit a layout, or create a new layout, you will see a screen like the one below.

• Title: The unique name of your layout.
• Author Box Preview: This is a live preview of your layout.
• Author Box Editor: You can customize hundreds of settings for your layout.

There are multiple ways to configure each layout. Here is an overview of what you can configure in each of the settings:

• Title: This is the title that will show for all the author boxes attached to a post. There is an option to configure the title for a single author or multiple authors.
• Avatar: Settings for the appearance of author profile images.
• Name: Settings for the display of author names.
• Author Bio: Settings for the display of the author bio field.
• Meta: Settings for the display of author email, site link, “View all posts” link, and more.
• Profile Fields: Control the display of the default author fields: First Name, Last Name, Email, and Website.
• Author Recent Posts: This shows a list of recent posts assigned to each author.
• Box Layout: Settings for the display of the box around each author profile.
• Custom CSS: Insert your own CSS styles for this specific layout.
• Export: Use this data to export your author box design and import it to a new site.
• Import: Paste the editor data from the “Export” tab on another site.
• Generate Theme Template: This enables you to move your layout into a file inside your theme.

All of these options give you a lot of flexibility when showcasing your authors. For example, all of your authors can have a “Recent Posts” area, as in this screenshot below:

You can also choose to add much more color to your Author Boxes. This example below has simplified many of the author details, and added a colored background.

This next example show an Author Box that has uses rounded corners for the box, avatar, and icons.

This new release of PublishPress Authors also allows you to generate PHP versions of your Author Boxes layouts. You can place these layouts inside your theme where you can add further customizations. You can also distribute them as required. For example, theme designers can include their own layouts for the Author Boxes inside their themes. Click here for more details.

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Check out the PublishPress Authors plugin

There have been tons of improvements to PublishPress Authors recently. Here's a list of what's launched and what is coming next:

• Personal profile editing: LAUNCHED
• Improved shortcodes: LAUNCHED
• Customizable author pages: LAUNCHED
• Display all your authors on one screen: LAUNCHED
• Better support for the WordPress REST API. LAUNCHED
• More design and layout options for profiles. LAUNCHED TODAY
• Schema integration with popular SEO plugins.

If you have a WordPress site with multiple authors, you should give PublishPress Authors a try. You'll find it's becoming the most complete solution for showing authors in WordPress.