I Can’t See the Author Dropdown Box in WordPress
This week, one PublishPress user asked us about an interesting WordPress problem.
They could not see the Author option when they were writing posts. This is how the Author dropdown normally appears:
They could not even enable the “Authors” box if they went to the “Options” panel in Gutenberg:
And the “Authors” feature was also missing from the “Quick Edit” area of WordPress. Normally, you will see an “Authors” dropdown when you click “Quick Edit” for a post.
So what is happening here? Where did the “Authors” feature go?
It turns out there are three likely explanations:
Explanation #1. You only have one Author
This is what happened to our PublishPress user. They only had one user who was in a user role with the ability to write posts.
They were an “Administrator”. However, all of the other users on the site were “Subscribers” and did not have any permission to write posts.
Because there is only one possible author for each post, WordPress automatically hides the “Authors” feature.
There is one caveat: it is possible for the “Authors” feature to appear if someone else is chosen as an Author, but has now been moved to the “Subscriber” role.
For more details on the default user roles on how this can happen, check out these links.
- What permissions do Subscribers have in WordPress?
- What permissions do Contributors have in WordPress?
- What permissions do Authors have in WordPress?
- What permissions do Editors have in WordPress?
Explanation #2. You are a Subscriber or Contributor
The Subscriber and Contributor roles are the lowest two roles in WordPress. They have the fewest permissions. This post has details on the technical side of user role levels.
Subscribers can not write or edit any content. So they can not even access the “Posts” screen, let alone see the Authors box.
Contributors can write content, but they only have access to their own Posts. They are now allowed to interact with content written by other users. So they are also denied access to the Authors box.
If you want to allow a role like Contributors to see the Authors box, you can give do this by giving them the “Edit Others” permission. You can do this with the PublishPress Capabilities plugin.
Explanation #3. Custom post types
Many custom post types don't have support for authors. Here's how to add authors to any custom post type.
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Josh Lewis
Multiple Authors metabox is superior to WordPress’s not just because of it’s ability to select many users and showing an avatar, but also because of ease/concise display. When you have thousands of users it would be much harder to find on WP’s default dropdown due to scrolling a huge list versus Multiple Author’s AJAX search results.
Steve Burge
Thanks Josh. Yes, it would be great to see more search boxes (rather than simple dropdowns) inside WordPress.
Raviraj
Thanks for the solution. In my case it was because there was only one author.
Clare Parkinson
Thank you so much for this. I had only one user on my site during development, and couldn’t figure out why the author dropdown wasn’t appearing on the admin panel. I switched themes, deactivated all plugins, etc. It would never have occurred to me that it was happening because I only had one author!
Johnny Olson
As of the last WP update to 5.9, Author list only shows Admins and Editors but no longer Contributors. Not sure what to do now.
Steve Burge
Hi Johnny. This may help: https://publishpress.com/blog/user-role-levels/. “The “Authors” dropdown for posts will only include users whose role has a level of 1 of higher.”
Daniel
I have been struggling for a few days to find a solution to this problem. There are 3 authors on the site, we all have the role of administrator. The problem is, we can’t select the author.