Customizable Author Page Slugs

  • How hard would it be to customize WordPress to include customizable Author Page permalink slugs?

    The problem I have with the current implementation is that while the_author_posts_link(); displays the author in text, the link is tied to the username; that is, if my display name is “John Doe”, the permalink to an author page will reveal my username as “NotAtAllAnonymous”. Placing your username (or your authors’ usernames) out there seems to me a potential security issue. While I use a pretty non-standard username for my self-hosted WordPress installation, and while others do not, I’d like to hide their usernames as well.

    Could something be placed in the Permalinks section of the Dashboard to include this option, where the category and tag base slug customizations are located, so that the admin could choose between

    • Username: “NotAtAllAnonymous”
    • Display Name: “john-doe” (different authors under the same name would be assigned numbers, like “john-doe-2”, etc.)
    • User Key: “1”

    for all users, or is there a plugin that provides this functionality already?

    Any direction will be greatly appreciated, whether to plugins or hacks. As I didn’t find anything right away, I’m assuming the functionality doesn’t exist. Thanks in advance.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • tigtog

    (@tigtoggmailcom)

    This is a feature I would like to see as well. I’ve always assigned users non-standard usernames, and it was only recently that I realised that WordPress just displays those usernames blithely. If there had been a warning when assigning usernames that they would be visible to all readers hovering over/clicking an author-link (so long as one is using pretty-permalinks) then perhaps I wouldn’t have done that – if I’d just made the username their actual name then it wouldn’t be so obvious (although of course any serious hacker will have picked up on this).

    It seems like a whole level of security with usernames has been lost by not having the author-link use either the “display name publicly” tag or the author-ID number instead of the username.

    Agree!

    Agree too!

    I agree!

    I will consider creating this plugin. Give me ideas how exactly you would like it to work.

    There is this plugin – Edit Author Slug. It doesn’t do everything cantemusdomino listed, but it does allow you to edit the slugs to whatever you want.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • The topic ‘Customizable Author Page Slugs’ is closed to new replies.