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Guest Author

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Guest Author

by WebFactory

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Description

Add a guest author to any post without needing to register the guest author as a user on your site.

Features

  • ✍️ Behaves as if guest authors were regular authors.
  • 👤 Upload your own avatar image instead of using Gravatar.
  • 🌍 Link to a custom page for the guest author.
  • 🔥 Perfect for guest posts.

Looking for nicer author boxes with more options? Check out our free Simple Author Box plugin.

  1. Gives you the ability to switch between registered user author and guest author.

    Gives you the ability to switch between registered user author and guest author.

How to disable this plugin?

Just use standard Plugin overview page in WordPress admin section and deactivate it or rename plugin folder /wp-content/plugins/guest-author over FTP access.

Will it slow my site down?

No, it won’t. It’s only loaded on the pages it protects.

How can I report security bugs?

You can report security bugs through the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Program. The Patchstack team help validate, triage and handle any security vulnerabilities. Report a security vulnerability.

What they call support is rather weird

By Hanno (bsoftde) on February 28, 2025

There was another comment that I'm simply repeating here because it describes my situation exactly - after three years, nothing has changed:
"They don’t test their plugin with the best/highest selling premium themes, so they have zero clue if their plugin will work with those themes or not. They just blindly hope that their plugin works and if it doesn’t, it’s the Theme’s fault only."

Feature request: nofollow the guest author URL

By Nima Shayanfar (nshayanfar) on November 5, 2024

The plugin works as advertised and is quite simple and handy. I have one request though. These days nofollowing the URL might be suitable for some admins. So it is missing.

Personal URL not working

By Jin-Liang, Lin (vedfolnir) on December 30, 2022

My site use the themes “Twenty Twenty-Two”. Custom URLs will not appear on the name.

Close to perfection

By gunawan004 on December 7, 2022

Its good, but didnt save the guest data so i have to write the same data over and over again

Support only Free themes

By dhirajshah on August 29, 2022

They don't test their plugin with the best/higest selling premium themes, so they have zero clue if their plugin with work with those themes or not. They just blindly hope that their plugin works and if it doesn't, it's the Theme's fault only.

Works as described

By inspired888 on July 5, 2022

I am mostly writing this review to counter what was written here:
crudoadmin — March 5, 2021 — Its a piece of junk
In my experience, the URL, Description and Avatar boxes are only greyed out if you haven't yet added an Author Name. If that first field (Name) is empty, then the other fields are disabled. This is to prevent people adding data to those other fields without providing an author name. Makes perfect sense to me. I suspect "crudoadmin" might not have taken the time to really test out what was going on. As for the plug-in itself ... works well. Out theme was even able to pull in the image, URL, and description (in the same way it pulls in the image, URL, and Bio from a registered user/author). Which means this plug-in is storing that info in standard WordPress fields, as opposed to making something up (which was the case with the Simply Guest Author plug-in, which we had to ditch for that very reason).

Its a piece of junk

By crudoadmin on March 5, 2021

It only allows to change Author to Guest and ad a name to the author, but it does not allow to add an Avatar (it's greyed out) nor a url (it's also greyed out) and in the post the "guest Author" name is not shown correctly but instead it shows the website's admin user.

Great work, guys!

By Dinev Dmitry (dimadinev) on December 9, 2020

Great work, guys! Thanks!

Very simple, but it just works

By lehmax on February 14, 2020

It's missing a few features that would make guest posts even more convenient, but other than that it's very good.

Works perfect

By alordiel on December 10, 2019

In my case I needed something that would create the admin part an I can then use it on my custom theme. Definitely saved me some time to create my own custom meta boxes for the posts. Needed only to customize the single post template page to show the guest meta information.

2.61

  • 2025-09-18
  • minor code fix

2.6

  • 2025-08-11
  • minor code fixes

2.5

  • 2023-12-05
  • Guest author name bug fix

2.4

  • 2023-11-29
  • security fix

2.3

  • 2022-11-22
  • minor fixes

2.2

  • 2020-05-09
  • minor fixes

2.1.8

  • Bug fixes

2.1.5

  • Makes author links optional. You can just leave the link blank.
  • Bug fixes

2.1.3

  • Bug fixes

2.1.2

  • Fixes a bug where the plugin doesn’t work with ajax requests

2.1

  • Fixes an issue with author avatar displaying for user comments
  • Now uses theme defaults for avatar styles

2.0

  • Adds support to Gutenberg. Finally 🎉

1.9.1

  • Adds support to Elementor’s Author Box Widget
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