Hey, this is Ben from WPAnswered.com. In this video,
you'll learn how to add an author box after your posts.
If you're trying to build a personal brand,
it's common to want to include a little bit about yourself as well as an avatar
after every post. Some themes add this automatically.
Others do not. Right now I'm using the Period theme,
which doesn't currently include an author box after the post content,
so I'd like to add one. Now to do this, there are a lot of plugins available,
but after reviewing the various options,
I found many of them to be either buggy or have styles that I didn't think
looked very good.
The one that I think has everything is the Simple Author Box plugin by Macho
Themes.
This plugin adds a stylish and configurable author box after all of your posts.
It's not buggy, it works well, and it has great reviews.
So this is the plugin that I recommend you use.
Here's how you can use it on your site right now. First,
we'll visit the dashboard and we'll go to the Add New plugins menu and to add a
new plugin,
I'll type in Simple Author Box here and we'll see that it's the first option
that shows up.
I'll click "Install Now" and once it's done installing,
I will click the "Activate" button.
Now one thing I don't love about this plugin is that it adds a top-level menu.
I really feel like it should just show up below Settings as I don't like plugins
taking up too much space in my toolbar,
but that's probably the only thing I dislike about this plugin.
Otherwise, it works really well.
Here in the settings menu you can see an example, um,
avatar, this is not a preview of your own,
just some example information of what the style looks like.
Below you'll find various settings for configuring what displays in the box.
Some appearance controls that are really nice.
You can add more space above and below the box. You can add padding,
change the border, and the avatar style.
You can even adjust the colors of the various aspects of the box and change the
fonts. So it's really customizable and easy to install.
Now that I have it installed, it's actually already, um,
it's already working on my site.
If I go ahead and visit and click on one of these posts,
you'll see at the bottom I already have this nice looking box.
You do see a few links added here.
These are only displaying for me because I am the admin.
So if I just go incognito so that I'm logged out,
you'll see this is what visitors see when they visit one of my posts.
It looks nice. It's got my bio, my name, uh, my avatar.
It's already looking really good and I'm happy with it as is.
Unlike some other plugins,
the default style of Simple Author Box is really nice.
Now you might be wondering where this info is coming from.
This is another thing I like about this plugin.
It sticks to the WordPress best practices.
If I go to the Users menu and I open up Your Profile,
you'll see that I have some fields here where I can edit the information that
WordPress knows about me. Here, I can add my name, my last name,
my nickname,
and then I can use the display name publicly dropped down to decide which one of
these combinations I want to use.
Simple Author Box respects this choice and uses this setting when outputting the
author box.
It also uses the biographical info field which um,
which is nice.
You should input this once when you're creating a profile and all plugins and
themes should use this information automatically.
And of course you can see I have my profile picture now in case you're not
familiar with Gravatar,
this is how I have my profile image automatically showing on my WordPress site.
When you sign up,
you enter in an email address and then you associate an avatar with that email
address. In fact, a lot of websites,
tons of websites around the web use Gravatar.
So once you associate an image with your email address, using Gravatar,
you'll find that as you sign into different apps and websites around the web,
your image will automatically show up because they all use Gravatar.
It's pretty cool and it definitely saves some time customizing your profiles
across the web,
so I would recommend setting up a Gravatar account if you don't already have
one.
That's how I'm able to put in my email address and automatically have a profile
picture showing up here. Of course, with the Simple Author Box plugin installed,
I also have this option to upload a custom image in case I don't want to use
Gravatar or don't like my Gravatar image.
And I also have all the different social media icon options.
I can choose the social platform I want to use.
Add my URL and then click this button to add as many of those social links as I
want. Overall Simple Author Box is a really nice plugin.
It's my favorite option for adding author boxes to WordPress. It's stylish,
customizable, and if you already have your profile filled out,
you might not need to do anything besides activating this plugin on your site to
add beautiful author boxes to your WordPress site. If you like this video,
please click the Like button below. If you want more WordPress tutorials,
don't forget to subscribe. If you still have any questions,
leave a comment below. Thanks for watching.