How to handle guest authors without creating profiles?

Personally, I like to have full control over my site and I don’t let anyone post. Instead, I have my guest authors send me the article and I post it on their behalf.

I know it’s more work for me but I prefer that over having many users, even with few permissions. I simply start the article with a quick blurb that it’s from a guest and end it with a short bio.

You could use custom fields and put in their name that way, like a byline.

I found this article.. How to Rewrite Guest Author Name with Custom Fields in WordPress

Haven’t tried it yet (I do plan to as I need the same functionality), but the logic seems sound..

https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-rewrite-guest-author-name-with-custom-fields-in-wordpress/

Tested and it works perfectly.. No more adding “fake” users to get accurate author information displayed in the post meta.. IMHO this is a better solution than manually adding extra text to the posts to announce the guest author.. (and I think this solution is what the OP was actually after in terms of a solution)

Here’s how it works.. It replaces the displayed name of the person who CREATED the post with the name you enter in your custom field.. If you click the author link, it still goes to the archives for the person who CREATED the post, but the displayed author name will show your guest author’s name in the post meta display..

You can see it in action here:
https:// clienthslawp . overthehillweb . com /2012/01/11/advanced-placement-method-annette-keenberg/

Click on the author link and you will see the posts CREATED BY one admin where the author names are using this new method of displaying the guest author’s name.. Hope that makes sense and is useful for someone looking for a similar solution..

Thank you for the suggestions and examples. I think the custom field method is a nice solution since it can even be used by authors and contributors, which frees up the admins from micromanaging guest profiles. Though the custom field method means the guest doesn’t have a dedicated author page like an actual author, you can simply embed the guest’s bio and photo in the post. Having the bio embedded in the post helps make the guest’s name searchable with WordPress search. The lack of an rss feed for the guest author is not critical since the guest would be attributed to so few posts that an rss feed would be unnecessary. If the guest asks to be promoted from mere custom field to an actual author with a feed and author page, then the admin could go and create a real profile but I imagine this would happen so infrequently it would be trivial.

If you don’t want to duplicate a bunch of bio info in each of the guest’s posts, here’s another variation. Have the editor create a new page with the guest’s bio and photo. Remember authors can’t create pages but editors can. In the guest’s post have the author put a link to the guest’s page. Or adjust the template code for the author name to also use a second custom field that holds the url to the guest’s page. This at least gives the guest a pseudo author page without having any sort of user profile.

If you don’t want to duplicate a bunch of bio info in each of the guest’s posts, here’s another variation. Have the editor create a new page with the guest’s bio and photo. Remember authors can’t create pages but editors can. In the guest’s post have the author put a link to the guest’s page. Or adjust the template code for the author name to also use a second custom field that holds the url to the guest’s page. This at least gives the guest a pseudo author page without having any sort of user profile.

I like this idea a lot.. However, I had a late night last night doing a site launch and my brain is tired.. So I can’t quite wrap my head around how to execute that last part at this moment.. **LOL** Would you mind sharing your code and how you would do this??

The use of 2 custom fields to hold the name of the guest and the url to the guest’s page was described in this earlier topic:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/replace-author-url-with-guest-author-link

Inside your functions.php create a function to return the author’s url (the $link parameter) or the guest’s url if the guest-url custom field is present. That topic shows how to add filters that will fire this function.

function guest_author_link( $link, $author_id, $author_nicename ) {
  global $post;
  $url = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'guest-url', true );
  if( $url ) {
      $link = $url;
  }
  return $link;
}

Note this is not tested and is only meant to convey the general idea. One feature of this 2 fields method is that the guest’s page can be anywhere like a twitter page or a facebook profile. If you want the guest’s page to be somewhere in your blog, you would create a bio Page or bio Post and just put the url to that content into the guest-url field.

Got it.. I will look at this later and see if I can implement without getting twisted up..