Cool Author Box: Free WordPress Plugin
After designing and building the Fancy Profile Box for the Pink & Yellow Media site I published an article on how to recreate it as a cool author box in your WordPress blog. This tutorial spurred a lot of interest and I got several emails and tweets asking me to convert it to a plugin. So I did.
As of right now the virst version (0.0.1) of the Cool Author Box plugin is available for download from the WordPress plugin directory. It is pre-beta and comes without any warranty or guarantees, but I’ve tested it on 4 very different blogs and it works fine on all of those.
The Cool Author Box WordPress plugin has been submitted to the WordPress Plugin Directory and I’ll announce it once it is accepted.
Click here to download the Cool Author Box WordPress plugin
Here’s the full rundown
The Cool Author Box plugin adds a stylish author box after the content in posts and/or pages. The box displays author name, author bio, author gravatar and a link to other articles by the author.
The Cool Author Box plugin adds information about the author to the bottom of the content of posts and/or pages. The information is gathered from the profile info set inside WordPress.
Items displayed are:
- Display name of the author of the post or page
- Gravatar of the author (set at www.gravatar.com)
- Link to other posts by the same author
- Link to author’s website
To make the author box appear you need to activa the plugin and go to the Cool Author Box settings under Settings and select if the box should appear under posts, pages or both.
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[...] Cool Author Box -Adds a author box to the top or bottom of posts and pages displaying the author name (linking to other posts by the same author), author website and author Gravatar in a cool and unusual layout. [...]
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[...] Cool Author Box -Adds a author box to the top or bottom of posts and pages displaying the author name (linking to other posts by the same author), author website and author Gravatar in a cool and unusual layout. [...]
This looks cool! I’m going to try it soon
Hi, it looks great and I have put it on my site.
Any way I can make it appear AFTER the Share buttons and BEFORE Related Posts?
Also it would be nice if you cold add an option for the size (length) small and default, as i would have liked it to be smaller in length.
Otherwise almost what I was lloking for
@Andy: This is the first version. I have a long list of options and functions I want to add down the road – just wanted to roll this basic one out first.
In the meantime you can set the width of the box manually by changing the width attribute of the .profile style in cool-author-box.php.
Hi Morten,
I’ve tried all of the author plugins and yours is by far the best.
The only problem I have though is that I run a multi author blog site, all of the authors do not have a wordpress.com account and therefore can not have a gravatar linked to their log in on my website.
Is there any chance that in the future you can allow the plug in to display the author bio picture instead of a gravatar?
Yasin: They don’t need a WordPress.com account. They can get Gravatars from Gravatar.com for free.
Hi Morten,
Thanks for your reply, how is the gravatar then linked to their account on my website?
@Yasin: The Gravatar is linked to whatever email address you use to set it up. As long as the email address in the user profile in your WordPress blog matches the one registered with Gravatar the image will show up.
I’d really like to know why this isn’t working for me! The gravatar email is the same email as the WordPress user email. What am I doing wrong? Or is there a known conflict with another plugin, or…?
Awesome. Thanks for your help Morten and I wish you luck with the plug in, I hope there’ll be more updates to it.
Thanks for this, I will check it out on my Blog.
nice widget, i hope i can use it, good article, thank you for it
This is a great plugin, Morten, just what I’ve been looking for. It really stands out. I have one request, since you said you were still working on future versions: can you make it so that we can manually enter the code where we want the author box to show up in the post? Thanks, man, and it’s a great plugin.
I love the plugin, but can I replace the gravatar image with a custom image?
Thanks again Morten
Yes, but you’d have to go in and change the code manually at this point. It’s on the list of things to add in the next release.
great plugin to mywebsite, thanks…
I’ve got gravatars for authors, same email as the user emails in my WordPress site, but no pics show up – what do I need to do to get this to work?
Thanks Morten, it worked just fine. I could reduce the width by changing it to as follows: “margin: 50px”
I look forward to your next release, where you give a few more options!
Thanks so much for developing this plugin! In the php file, the comment says that the box can be added to the top or bottom of a post, but the readme says it can only be added to the bottom. What can i modify to make it appear at the top?
Thanks again!
- Ryan
Hiii, how to add custom’s information ?
a video tutorial will be great –
more over it may also attract more users
I?ve recently started a blog, the information you provide on this site has helped me tremendously. Thank you for all ?
This is really a great stuff thanks for sharing. Keep it up. I will bookmark this blog, and will come back often. Hoster
I have problem to activate this plugin on WordPress 3.0.1:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING, expecting T_STRING in D:\xampplite\htdocs\wp-content\plugins\cool-author-box\cool-author-box.php on line 50
I think this plugin is great, thank you. My only bugbear (I’m a writer) is in the section at the bottom where it gives the website, it doesn’t have an apostrophe, so where it should say Michelle’s website, it says Michelles website. Nails down a chalkboard to a grammar stickler like me
. Is there anyway you could get that apostrophe in there?