Display Author Photo & Bio in WordPress

There have been a few projects I have worked on recently that required an author image and a short biography. This is actually a fairly quick process and this post will guide you through the steps of implementing this onto your site.

Getting The Plugin

You will need to download this plugin created by Denis de Bernardy and place the files into the /wp-content/plugins/ directory. After the plugin is installed, you will need to activate it in the WordPress control panel. You will then be able to upload author photos by clicking on the Users/Profile tab and clicking edit on the author you’d like to add a photo for. You can also update the author’s biographical information on this page.

After these steps are finished, it’s time to add the following code to single.php in your WordPress template directory (ie. /wp-content/themes/default/single.php)

<div class="box">
<?php the_author_image(); ?>
<?php the_author_description(); ?>
</div>

You might notice that I didn’t throw the entry_author_image class in the code above, but that’s because it is automatically generated by the plugin.

Apply Some Styles

Now the author image and description should be showing up on all single posts, if you would like to style them you can apply some CSS to the box and entry_author_image classes:

.box {
  padding: 8px;
  min-height: 60px;
  background: #efefef;
}

.entry_author_image {
  float: left;
  background: #fff;
  padding: 4px;
  margin-right: 8px;
  border-right: solid 1px #dfdfdf;
  border-bottom: solid 1px #dfdfdf;
}

That’s It

After completing this tutorial your results should be very similar to the Author section shown in the photo above.

But wait, there’s more?

When I originally wrote this article for the woorkup community there were a couple comments about using the gravatar feature that is already built into the newer versions of WordPress. This is definitely an option as well and Chris Spooner even wrote a nice tutorial on it, but I use Bernardy’s plugin mainly so my clients won’t have to go to third party sites if they would want to update their author photo.