Co-Authors Plus v2.6.3: Enhancements and bug fixes

Co-Authors Plus makes it easy to add multiple bylines to a given post, and has full support for custom post types. Out just a moment ago, v2.6.3 has the following improvements:

  • AJAX user search is back to searching against first name, last name, display name, email address and user ID. The method introduced in v2.6.2 didn’t scale well across hundreds of users.
  • French translation courtesy of Sylvain Bérubé.
  • Spanish translation courtesy of Alejandro Arcos.
  • Bug fix: Resolved incorrect caps check against user editing an already published post. Thanks to Doug in the WordPress.org forums for the help.

Please post any questions, bug reports, feature requests, etc. in the WordPress.org forums. If you want to contribute code, I’m eyeballing co-author management in Quick Edit and guest author functionality for v2.7.

For WordPress.com VIPs, this update has already been deployed to the shared plugins repo.

Co-Authors Plus v2.6.2: Enhancements and bug fixes

Co-Authors Plus makes it easy to add multiple bylines to a given post, and has full support for custom post types. Out just a moment ago, v2.6.2 has the following improvements:

  • AJAX user search matches against first name, last name, and nickname fields too, in addition to display name, user login, and email address.
  • Comment moderation and approved notifications are properly sent to all co-authors with the correct capabilities.
  • Filter required capability for user to be returned in an AJAX search with ‘coauthors_edit_author_cap’. This defaults to ‘edit_posts’
  • Filter out administrators and other non-authors from AJAX search with ‘coauthors_edit_ignored_authors’
  • Automatically adds co-authors to Edit Flow’s story budget and calendar views.
  • Bug fix: Don’t set post_author value to current user when quick editing a post. This doesn’t appear in the UI anywhere, but added the post to the current user’s list of posts. See related forum conversation.
  • Bug fix: Properly cc other co-authors on new comment email notifications
  • Bug fix: If a user has already been added as an author to a post, don’t show them in the AJAX search again.
  • Bug fix: Allow output constants to be defined in a theme’s functions.php file and include filters you can use instead.

Please post any questions, bug reports, feature requests, etc. in the WordPress.org forums. If you want to contribute code, I’m eyeballing co-author management in Quick Edit and guest author functionality for v2.7.

For WordPress.com VIPs, this update has already been deployed to the shared plugins repo.

Allowing authors to set co-authors

In the WordPress.org forums, whoaloic asks:

I have a site with multiple authors.
I would like to allow authors who create a post or a page to give rights to other authors.
For now, only administrator and editor can do that.
Is there a solution?

Yep, totally doable. By default, Co-Authors Plus defaults to ‘edit_others_posts’ as the required cap for changing co-authors. With the following code snippet in your theme’s functions.php file, you can make that cap ‘publish_posts’ instead (which authors and above usually have).

/**
 * Filter the Co-Authors Plus current_user_can_set_authors() function
 * so that users with 'publish_posts' can set Co-Authors
 *
 * @author danielbachhuber
 *
 * @see https://github.com/danielbachhuber/Co-Authors-Plus/issues/8
 * @see http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-co-authors-plus-allow-authors-post-to-give-access-to-other-authors
 */
add_filter( 'coauthors_plus_edit_authors', 'db_filter_coauthors_edit_cap' );
function db_filter_coauthors_edit_cap( $cap_result ) {
	global $coauthors_plus;

	$post_type = $coauthors_plus->get_current_post_type();
	if( ! $post_type ) return false;
	
	$post_type_object = get_post_type_object( $post_type );
	return current_user_can( $post_type_object->cap->publish_posts );
}

In preparing this snippet, I also opened a couple of issues in Github:

Show biographies for co-authors at the end of your post

In the WordPress.org forums, doubleedesign says:

I want to add the authors’ biographies to the end of each post.

Awesome… it’s pretty simple to do. Conceptually, what we need to do is load our co-authors, and then loop through printing the relevant information for each one.

You’ll want to put the following code snippet within The Loop in any template you’d like the bios to appear.

/**
 * Show multiple Co-Author biography fields at the bottom of a single post 
 * This snippet should be placed within The Loop
 */
if ( class_exists( 'coauthors_plus' ) ) {
	// Get the Co-Authors for the post
	$co_authors = get_coauthors();
	// For each Co-Author, echo a wrapper div, their name, and their bio if they have one
	foreach ( $co_authors as $key => $co_author ) {
		$co_author_classes = array(
			'co-author-wrap',
			'co-author-number-' . ( $key + 1 ),
		);
		echo '<div class="' . implode( ' ', $co_author_classes ) . '">';
		echo '<h4 class="co-author-display-name">' . $co_author->display_name . '</h4>';
		// Only print the description if the description exists
		if ( $description = get_the_author_meta( 'description', $co_author->ID ) )
			echo '<p class="co-author-bio">' . $description . '</p>';
		echo '</div>';
	}
}

If you’d like other co-author details to appear as well, like their avatar for instance, you can modify the output within the foreach loop.

Co-Authors Plus v2.6: Search user’s display names, change byline order and more

Co-Authors Plus makes it easy to add multiple bylines to a given post, and has full support for custom post types. Out this evening, v2.6 has the following improvements:

  • Sortable authors — drag and drop the order of the authors as you’d like them to appear
  • Search for authors by display name so you can easily add bylines by first or last name
  • Option to remove the first author when there are two or more listed
  • More reliably generates the published post count for each user

Thanks to those in the forum who provided feedback and special thanks to Russell Heimlich for his contributions with sortable authors. If you feel like giving back, there are a few tickets open we’d love patches for. In particular, guest bylines would be pretty neat. I have a possible direction you can go if you’re looking for inspiration.

For our WordPress.com VIPs, this release will be available in the shared plugins directory in just a moment.

Co-authors in your RSS feeds

In the WordPress.org forums, razorfrog asks:

Short of editing core WordPress code, is it possible to display the multiple authors in the site’s RSS feed?

Of course there is! From the source code, we know the RSS feed template uses the_author() to display the post’s byline information. Furthermore, the_author() echoes get_the_author() which is a filterable function. Filters allow us to programmatically change values used in a function. What we need to do is write a short snippet to produce the co-authors byline when an RSS feed is requested and Co-Authors Plus is activated.

The snippet is as follows, and can be placed in your theme’s functions.php file or a standalone MU plugin.

/**
 * Co-authors in RSS and other feeds
 * /wp-includes/feed-rss2.php uses the_author(), so we selectively filter the_author value
 */
function db_coauthors_in_rss( $the_author ) {

if ( !is_feed() || !function_exists( 'coauthors' ) )
   return $the_author;

return coauthors( null, null, null, null, false );
}
add_filter( 'the_author', 'db_coauthors_in_rss' );