Support » Plugins » Why is the post author commented out of themes?

  • Recently I wondered why blog entries in many themes never seem to display their author. This seems like a very important feature to me, especially when you have multiple authors on a blog. How are you supposed to know who wrote something? As I poked around the themes for the best place to add it I came across the code already in place but commented out.

    Why?

    I fixed the problem (by uncommenting it) and added it to single.php as well, but it makes me wonder why that was done in the first place. I feel that the author is very important and needs to be displayed on all posts, and I have modified all of my themes to do so. Since many themes are based off of the default theme they have the same commented author code. I’ve made a patch to update the default theme but I wanted to know if there was a method to this madness before opening a ticket.

    I have also made the author a link to the author archive page and added a feed link to the category and author archive pages. The category and author feeds are nice features, but visitors won’t use them if they don’t know about them!

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  • many blogs only have one author, so having the author name everywhere would just be annoying, redundant, and un-necessary. why on earth would you open a ticket for something like that? its theme author preference and easy to uncomment or add.

    Thread Starter vimm

    (@vimm)

    Many blogs also have multiple authors, and showing the name is a necessity. I’d open a ticket to submit my patch for added features on the default theme, but I don’t want to open it if those features are intentionally being withheld.

    Currently there are no links anywhere to the category or author feeds, and since many themes are based off the default they consequently don’t have those links either. As a result users don’t know these features exist (and they’ve asked me for them). If people know about them they’re more likely to use them, and if it’s in the default theme more theme authors are likely to discover them too. I also made the author’s name a link to the author archive page since there’s no way to find that page either (that I know of).

    I feel that not showing the author is more annoying than potentially not needing it. It’s no more cumbersome than displaying the date on every post. You say it can be uncommented if you want it, but I could also make the argument it’s just as easy to comment out if you don’t want it.

    It’s much easier to remove a feature you know about than to add a feature you don’t know about.

    Thank you Vimm, I share your viewpoint. I finally found where to comment in the author on posts but cannot find where to do the same for archive displays and catagory displays. Any help will be appreciated.

    @ronbell – that’s a very theme dependent question. A link to your blog or theme in use would be helpful.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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