How to Add Multiple Authors (Co-Authors) for Posts in WordPress

Do you want to show multiple authors for a post in WordPress? Many websites often have multiple authors working on the same article. For example, on news websites sometimes multiple journalists contribute to a single story. In that case you may want to give credit to all the authors who worked on the post. In this article, we will show you how to allow multiple authors to be associated with a post in WordPress.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Co-Authors Plus plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Next, you need to edit the post or page where you want to credit multiple authors.

On the post edit screen, you will notice the new ‘Authors’ box just below the post editor.

By default, it will show the original author of the post. You can add additional authors by entering their name in the search box below.

The plugin will start showing users as you type. You need to select the user that you want to add as an author by clicking on it.

The selected author name will now appear below the original author name.

You can continue adding more authors as needed. Once you are done, you can save or publish your post.

Showing Multiple Authors On Your WordPress Site

Unfortunately, the plugin does not automatically display multiple authors on your site. For that you’ll need to edit your theme files. If you haven’t done this before, then please see our guide on how to copy paste code in WordPress.

You’ll need to edit theme files with the code responsible for showing the author name for posts. This could be single.php, content.php, or a template tag in your theme’s functions.php file. See our tutorial on how to find which theme files to edit in WordPress.

You will be looking for the code with template tag the_author_posts_link() and you will need to replace it with the following code snippet.

if ( function_exists( 'coauthors_posts_links' ) ) {
    coauthors_posts_links();
} else {
    the_author_posts_link();
}

Here is how it looked it on our demo website.

For more examples of template tags, please visit plugin’s website.

Adding Guest Authors to Your WordPress Site

By default, this plugin can only look up and show registered users on your website. What if you wanted to give credit to guest authors who do not have an account on your WordPress site?

There are multiple ways to accept user submitted posts in WordPress. You can create an account for authors, or you can accept posts directly from front-end of your website. See detailed instructions in our guide on how to allow users to submit posts to your WordPress site.

Co Authors Plus offers a simpler work around for that. It allows you to add guest authors without giving them access to the admin area or writing privileges on your website. Guest authors can send you their posts via email, and you can add them to your WordPress site.

Let’s see how to add guest authors in Co Authors Plus.

First, you need to head over to Users » Guest Authors page and click on the ‘Add New’ button at the top.

On the next screen, you need to provide author information such as name, email, website, etc. Once you are done, click on ‘Add new guest author’ button to save your changes.

That’s all you have successfully added a guest author.

Now you will be able to select them as author for posts on your WordPress site, just like you would select registered users.

We hope this article helped you learn how to allow multiple authors to be associated with a post in WordPress. You may also want to see our list of 21 plugins to efficiently manage WordPress multi-author blogs.

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