PublishPress Authors 3.2.4 Has More Import Options and Yoast SEO Compatibility

PublishPress Authors is a plugin that we've been slowly improving for a couple of years now.

PublishPress Authors allows you to add multiple authors to one post. You can also have guest authors who don't need a WordPress account.

Earlier this year, we released a Free version on WordPress.org. It's growing steadily and we hope it will soon be a popular alternative to older plugins such as Co-Authors Plus.

This week, we released new versions of PublishPress Authors Free and also the Pro version. Here's an overview of what's new.

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Import from either the Byline or Bylines plugin

There are now improved import options available for PublishPress Authors.

You can import from the Bylines plugin (we acquired this in 2018) or the the Byline plugin (which is no longer being updated).

Here's how to use the import process:

• Start with either Byline or Bylines installed on your site.
• Go to “Authors”, then “Maintenance”.
• Look for the import option:

• You will see a progress bar showing the import process.
• When the progress bar has finished, we'll give the option to easily delete the old plugin:

Finally, we've also improved the import process for people moving from the Co-Authors Plus plugin.

• Click for full Bylines import instructions.
• Click for full Byline import instructions.
• Click for full Co-Authors Plus import instructions.

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Layouts can target specific authors

A couple of PublishPress users asked if there was a way to visually distinguish between Guest Authors and authors with WordPress accounts. They wanted to do this because everyone with an account was an employee of their organization, and needed a special label.

This is now possible with two new classes for author layouts.

• guest-author
• not-guest-author

These classes are automatically applied to individual author pages and can be manually applied to specific layouts.

For more on this, click here and scroll down to the section on “Body Classes“.

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Lots of bug fixes

This release fixes a lot of issues. Perhaps most importantly, we made sure that PublishPress Authors is fully compatible with Yoast SEO with these two fixes:

• Fixed: Wrong author data in the Yoast SEO schema for structured data (#77)
• Fixed: Fixed author page title when using Yoast SEO (#80);

We also solved a series of other bug reports from users.

• Fixed: Fixed the error displayed on Windows servers when the constant DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR is not defined;
• Fixed: Fixed compatibility with composer based sites;
• Fixed: Broken body class for guest authors “author-” (#43);
• Fixed: Wrong authors in the header of pages based on Genesis framework (#46);
• Fixed: Empty author headline for guest authors (#47);
• Fixed: Fixed some texts and style in the Co-authors plugin migration box;
• Fixed: Fixed the result of the function get_the_author_posts_link for supporting multiple authors;