Authors not showing in search

Hi @paywall,

Thank you for reaching out and bringing this issue to our attention. I’m sorry to hear that you’re experiencing difficulties with the author search functionality after the recent update to version 5.0.5.

The author search feature primarily queries the following fields in the WordPress database:

• display_name: This is the name displayed publicly on your site.
• user_login: The username used for logging into WordPress.
• user_email: The email address associated with the user account.

If authors are not appearing in the search results when using their first or last names, it might be because these names are not included within their respective display_name fields. For instance, if an author’s display_name is set to their username (user_login) rather than their full name, searching by first or last name won’t yield results.

Please verify if the authors’ display_name fields include their first and/or last names. You can do this by navigating to Users > All Users in your WordPress dashboard and reviewing each user’s display name.

To assist you more effectively, could you please provide an example of a user who isn’t appearing in the search results by first or last name but can be found using their email address? This will help us pinpoint the issue more accurately and ensure a swift resolution.

Thank you for your patience and cooperation. We’re committed to ensuring that your experience with our plugin remains smooth and efficient.

The Molongui Support Team

Hi,

Does Rachel—or any other author not appearing in the results dropdown—belong to a User Role that is inactive in the plugin settings? If you are using the free version of the plugin, only users with the Administrator, Editor, Author, and Contributor roles are searchable. If you are using the Pro version of the plugin, then you can select which User Roles are searchable by navigating to Authors > Settings > Writing), so ensure that Rachel’s User Role is enabled.

Please let me know.

Since we’re unable to reproduce the issue on our testing server, could you please provide access to a staging site where we can investigate further?

We appreciate your cooperation and are committed to assisting you in resolving this matter.

Great! Please submit the access details by creating a new ticket here, and our team will begin investigating promptly.

We appreciate your cooperation and patience!

For anyone following this thread, we will update here with the final resolution.

The issue reported has been fixed in plugin version 5.0.6. It was caused by the JavaScript library used for the search-as-you-type feature in the author search box, which limited results to 5 by default. The latest update increases this limit to 400. If you need more results, you can use the molongui_authorship/author_search_results_limit filter.

We thank @paywall for reporting the issue and assisting us by setting up a staging site to help debug and resolve the problem.