Author Box Works Well, Extra Guest Author “Pro” Features Are Really Bad

  • I give it 3 stars because the author box functionality works (but you cannot customize the Gravatar size – bummer), but nothing else works well. The plugin seems to promise quite a few things beyond the normal author box that had me pretty excited about it. I even purchased the Pro version. Nothing seems to work as you’d expect it to though. The extra features are super buggy and not thought out well. A few examples:

    GUEST AUTHORS REQUIRE AN EMAIL – this is terrible! The point of having “guest authors” feature is to not have to collect their info and log everyone in the user table, but apparently that’s exactly what this does. You might as well just make them a user then and not give them a login. It would accomplish the same thing.
    YOU CAN’T HAVE ONLY ONE GUEST AUTHOR, YOU ALWAYS APPEAR TOO – apparently you as an admin always still show up too. It’s really weird. So even though you can “select guest author” for the post there’s still two of you on it as if it’s a co-author and the meta data of the post still says it was written by you, not the guest author. Defeats the whole purpose of having guest author functionality!
    SOMETIMES CAN’T UPLOAD AN IMAGE FOR THE GUEST AUTHOR – Apparently if you create the guest/co-author a certain way, say from the new post screen, you can’t then go to the user tables and attach an image for them. The upload buttons just don’t work. Nothing happens at all.

    • This topic was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by rileyadamvoth.
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  • @rileyadamvoth – Thanks for taking the time to review our plugin ??

    1. The reason we require (although, we could probably re-consider this and change it down the road) an email address for a guest author is that it can be then turned into a full-fledged co-author directly. Basically, with 1-click you’d be turning a regular guest author into a co-author / contributing author / editor / etc.

    2. You’re totally right about this and I didn’t even realise we missed this. I’ve added it to our development road map and it’ll be implemented, pinkie promise. (here’s our GitHub link for this issue: https://github.com/MachoThemes/simple-author-box/issues/75).

    3. This indeed seems to be a bug and it’ll get squased ASAP.

    THANK YOU for taking the time to write all of this as well as review SAB.

    We’re far from having the perfect product but we’re really trying our best.

    Thanks,
    Cristian.

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