Most WordPress themes, are faced with several limitation of an effective author box. This is due to lack of features that are needed to give your author box a be fitting look to your audience.
However, when it comes to adding more features to your author pages, it is important to know what features could be limited for a WordPress user.
Such limitation that a WordPress user may face are
Limitation of fixing pictures for a guest author or co-author
Not being able to fix links to your social media platforms
Lack of options to customize the font to be used
Another could be limitation to changing colour and background of the author box
Features of including links to guest authors articles and so much more.
So Here I have really take out some time to check out best plugins for this kind of job you may find interesting.
So If you want to add more features to your author page or box, or want to make some adjustments without having to dive headlong into code, the following plugins should help you out considerably:
— 1. Simple Author Box —
Pin
When it comes to get a good looking and highly responsive plugin, simple author box is one of a kind you will love to try. Depending on your taste, it is light weight.
It come with customizable font family, size, colour, and social media links that displays logos of the social media link platforms.
More so, you can customize the author box to fit your website theme.
The plugin option, once activated displace author box in post by default. And can be controlled from setting > simple author box page.
As the name implies, co-authors plus appears on a co-author archive page and in their feed as well. This plugin is quite good for ensuring that everyone who deserves credit on a post gets his due.
It also has a very nice features of running search, especially for blogs having lots of authors.
It is not highly customizable as one of its downside.
However, on it’s good side, you can Add writers as bylines without creating WordPress user accounts. Simply create a guest author profile for the writer and assign the byline as you normally would.
So far with what I have seen with this plugin, I will really borrow the writer of this great plugins words.
WP Author Bio is a WordPress author bio plugin that supports single and multiple authors with co-authors plus. It offers tons of options to customize the box after WordPress posts about the author(s).
The author bio box is highly responsive and inclused what is tagged as five sexy social icon sets to choose from, with support for all the following social networks: Behance, Blogger, Delicious, DeviantArt, Dribbble, Facebook, Flickr, GitHub, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pinterest, RSS, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, Yahoo! & YouTube.
When it comes to simplicity, Meks Smart Author Widget is so on point. Its features include;
Flexible display options
Auto detect post author on single post and author templates
Custom avatar size
Link avatar image to author archive (optional)
Link user display name to author archive (optional)
Replace widget title with user display name (optional)
The beauty of this plugins is that it allows you to display author/user info inside WordPress widget. Smart feature of this plugin is user/author “auto detection” which means that it can optionally show author of current post on single post templates or on specific author archive.
These theme is actually available at WordPress plugin repository.
The plugin is very easy to use and customize. Right after installation the author bio is, by default, enabled on all your posts, pages and custom post types. You can disable the author box where you don’t want it or implement it manually using:
Widget
Template tag
Shortcode
It is highly customizable. It has Co-Authors Plus and RSS feed support.
All picks I have done is based on my user experience with these plugins. However, it all depends on what you want to achieve based on the features you might need.
Your opinion based on your own user experience with other plugins you have tried on author box is very welcome. It will really be of great help.
To know how you can build up brand for yourself and being recognize using author box, click here.
