phpWordPress author pages: Enhanced support for Authors (2005)

On 30 March 2005, phpWordPress staff wrote that “new support for Authors is implemented”. Each author now had a landing page with personal details and a list of published articles. Authors were managed in the Users/Authors section of the administration area. That is the whole announcement.

phpWordPress was a commercial PHP article manager from Spoonlabs, renamed Vivvo in 2006 and unrelated to WordPress. The release history lists it between the March search update and the April module release.

What did author pages do for a site?

Before this change, a byline was probably just text. An author landing page turns the name into a place readers can go. It collects every article by that person, and it gives the publication a spot to say who the author is.

The archived template documentation names a “Featured Author” box template, box_featuredAuthor.tpl, which suggests authors could also be promoted on other pages. The pricing chart lists four user levels, writer, trusted writer, editor and admin, so the author feature sat alongside an editorial permission model. The archive does not link the two features, so we describe them separately.

What did it mean for a small publisher in 2005?

Two practical effects. Contributors got a profile page that credited their work, which helps when you recruit unpaid or part-time writers. And readers who liked one article could find the rest by that writer without searching.

The costs were small but real. Someone had to maintain each author’s personal details. The announcement says nothing about who could edit them or whether authors could do it themselves.

How do modern CMSs handle authors?

Most current systems create an author archive page automatically for each user who has published. What differs is how much control you get over it: whether you can add a biography and photo, hide the page for guest contributors, or change its address.

Search engines also read author information from structured data. Google’s Article documentation defines two relevant properties. The author.name property is the name of the author, and author.url is a link to a web page that uniquely identifies the author. For several authors, Google says to list each in its own author field and not to merge the names. The documentation describes these properties as ways to help Google understand authors across its features. It does not say author pages are required.

So an author landing page can serve two purposes: a page for readers and a stable URL to point the markup at. When evaluating a CMS, check these points:

• Does it generate an author page per user, and can you turn it off for one-off contributors?
• Can the page carry a biography and links?
• Does the Article markup output the author name and a URL, or only a name?
• Can an article list more than one author?

The guides cover evaluation checklists, and the Product Updates board has the other 2005 announcements in order.