Multiple Authors 3 is Ready for Testing
By default, WordPress only allows you to add one author to each post.
Multiple Authors is a plugin that allows you to add as many authors as you want. This is really useful for teams who work together on content.
Multiple Authors also offers other ways to improve how WordPress handles authors:
- You can create Guest Authors who appear just like regular authors … only they don’t need their own WordPress account.
- You can choose to remove all the authors from a post. By default, WordPress forces you have at least one author.
Multiple Authors was originally built on top of older plugins Co-Authors Plus and Bylines. But with version 3, Multiple Authors is vastly improved and fully ready for WordPress in 2019.
Version 3 of Multiple Authors is now in beta and it's a big step forward. Here's an overview of what's new …
MA 3 is a standalone plugin
Multiple Authors was launched as an add-on for the main PublishPress plugin. However, many people asked us to release it as a standalone plugin. So now Multiple Authors is an independent plugin with it's own menu links in the WordPress admin area:
MA 3 has custom fields
Multiple Authors originally shipped with basic user details. You can now add your own fields to author profiles. The current field options are Text, Multiline Text, WYSIWYG Editor, Link and Email, but we're open to adding more, based on your feedback.
MA 3 has customizable layouts
All of the profile layouts in Multiple Authors are now customizable layouts. The goal is to all you to easily create author profiles that match your site.
Each layout is editable using Twig. For example, in one of the images above, we saw a field with the slug personal_website. You can add that field to your layouts using this syntax:
{{ author.personal_website }}
MA 3 has a cleaner interface
Version 3.0 also contains a lot of little improvements to improve your Multiple Authors experience. One change is that we've removed the default “Author” box from the “Quick Edit” area of WordPress.
We've also removed the “Author” dropdown from inside Gutenberg.
These two changes mean that there's only one place to add and remove authors:
Over to you …
Update: thanks to everyone who tested. Multiple Authors 3.0 is now available as an official release.
