Title: Update Author Metadata on Posts
Last modified: February 7, 2019

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# Update Author Metadata on Posts

 *  Resolved [acann](https://wordpress.org/support/users/acann/)
 * (@acann)
 * [7 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/update-author-metadata-on-posts/)
 * Hi, can someone explain to me how the “author” display name on Posts can be updated?
   I have found that updating the Name/Display Name/Nickname of the authors’ User
   Profile does not alter the author tag on old posts. Is there a way to get this
   metadata on the post updated?
 * Is there a select I could do on the database to update this?
 * Many thanks for any help you can provide.

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

 *  [Joy](https://wordpress.org/support/users/joyously/)
 * (@joyously)
 * [7 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/update-author-metadata-on-posts/#post-11177527)
 * That applies to comments, but not to posts.
    For a comment, the name and email
   is saved as text in the comment table. For a post, the author ID is saved, which
   is a number that is used to look up the author details in the user table.
 * The user profile page has a choice for how the name should be displayed publicly,
   and the theme is supposed to respect that choice. If it isn’t, that is a theme
   problem. If you didn’t actually change how it should be displayed, you should
   try that.
 *  Thread Starter [acann](https://wordpress.org/support/users/acann/)
 * (@acann)
 * [7 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/update-author-metadata-on-posts/#post-11181357)
 * Ah thanks so much for responding! One followup question, the “author ID” is that
   an internal numeric ID? Or is that perchance the “nicename”? I did change the
   nicename (I always manually change the nicename in the database so that it is
   not the same as the username).
 *  [Joy](https://wordpress.org/support/users/joyously/)
 * (@joyously)
 * [7 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/update-author-metadata-on-posts/#post-11181406)
 * It’s the author ID in the post table. The option for which to display is on the
   User profile page. It only shows the names that are available to choose from.
 *  Thread Starter [acann](https://wordpress.org/support/users/acann/)
 * (@acann)
 * [7 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/update-author-metadata-on-posts/#post-11193455)
 * Thanks for the help, after searching I found that the Genesis theme has a specific
   setting where you define what will be used for the post meta. In this case, it
   had been set as a text string (not a variable) which is why it wasn’t updated.
 * Thanks for the help [@joyously](https://wordpress.org/support/users/joyously/)

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

The topic ‘Update Author Metadata on Posts’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [author](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/author/)
 * [metadata](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/metadata/)
 * [posts](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/posts/)
 * [update](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/update/)

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 4 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [acann](https://wordpress.org/support/users/acann/)
 * Last activity: [7 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/update-author-metadata-on-posts/#post-11193455)
 * Status: resolved

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