How to Create Custom Author Pages Using PublishPress Blocks
By default, WordPress provides pages that display the posts written by each author. These author pages will normally be located at a URL like this /author/username/.
For example, you can find all my PublishPress posts by clicking on this link. That URL is a good example of how these pages work.
However, these author pages can be impacted by plugins and themes. In this guide, we're going to show a different and more flexible approach to building your author pages.
The problem with WordPress Author Pages
Some plugins and themes will modify these pages or provide their own.
For example, our PublishPress Authors plugin has an “Author Pages” feature. We built this because some third-party themes and plugins interfere with the core WordPress author pages feature.
This screenshot below shows some of the settings available in PublishPress Authors:
Create Custom Author Page Using Content Display Block
In this guide, we will improve our Author Pages by using the Content Display block from the PublishPress Blocks plugin. This will give you more flexibility and more customization options. This approach won't scale easily to large sites with many authors, but could be a very good option for a small site with a few authors.
- Make sure you have the PublishPress Blocks plugin installed.
- Create a new page, and enter the Author's name as the title. In this example, I'm using “Riza” as the title.
- Edit the permalink to whatever you want. In this tutorial, I use the author name as the permalink.
- Click on the “+” icon to add a new block.
- Search for “Content Display” in the block search bar.
- Select the “Content Display” block from the results.
- You now have the Content Display block inserted into your page. You can customize it however you like.
- Make sure you select the correct Author in the block setting
- You can select the layout on the block toolbar. We have 6 layouts, from List, Grid, Slider, Newspaper, Frontpage, and Masonry.
- You can read more about the full potential of Content Display Blocks in our documentation.
- This is a sample that we created by using the Frontpage layout and putting the author box on top of it
- Make sure to set up a redirect from the old URL to your new URL. You can use a plugin like Redirection.
- Put your old URL into “Source URL” and put your new URL on “Target URL” then click “Add Redirect”.
- That's it. Now you have a new custom author page that you can customize however you want.
More with PublishPress Blocks Pro
You can have more options for Content Display blocks by using the Pro version of PublishPress Blocks. For example, you can display the image above or below the title using Section Order. You will also have Google Font and text transform support so you can choose from 1400 available Google fonts to customize the post title, info, and content and read more links. If you are interested in the Pro version, you can purchase it here.
