Posted by If you look to the sidebar on this site you’ll see my author info. This data is generated from the Users section of WordPress and helps inform your website visitors about the post and site author. It’s an opportunity to inform and give confidence to the reader of your site, as well as to provide links to other personal or relevant sites.
This short tutorial will help you display author information on your WordPress site using a Gravatar, and the profile information on your author page. This will be displayed on your site posts using Meks Smart Author Widget.
What is a Gravatar?
A Gravatar is a ‘globally recognized avatar’. You can think of it as your own personal badge, or icon that is used around the internet when you post or comment in different forums, blog posts or discussion boards. It allows fellow internet used to recognize your image when you appear online.
Many WordPress themes now include Gravatar functionality built-in, and those that don’t can easily be updated with plugins to include your Gravatar.
How to Change Your Gravatar Image
Gravatar is owned by Automattic, who also owns WordPress.com, JetPack and WooCommerce, so integrating Gravatar with your WordPress site is a straightforward process.
You need to do a few things to get your Gravatar set up:
- Choose a suitable image. This can be a photo, a graphic or icon. This will be displayed with a circle mask most of the time so ensure the focus of your image is central.
- Visit gravatar.com. Log in with your wordpress.com account.
- Visit My Gravatars using the links in the menu bar.
- Choose the email that you use for your WordPress site.
- Upload your Gravatar image.
- Go to My Profile, and select Websites from the links on the right-hand side.
- Add your website using the Add Website link.
We’ve done what we need to do on Gravatar. Now if we go to Dashboard > Users > Your Profile we will see that our Gravatar image is included as part of our profile.
Setting Up Meks Smart Author Widget to Display Author Information
We’re going to use the Meks Smart Author Widget to intelligently display author information on the sidebar of our site. This will mean that when a post is displayed, the author of the post will be automatically be shown, along with a link to their profile page, and links to the rest of their posts, if required.
Firstly, install and activate the plugin by visiting Dashboard > Plugins > Add New. Ensure you’re installing the plugin shown below:
As highlighted in the name of this plugin, it’s actually a widget, so we’re going to place this in a sidebar where we want to see user data. I want my author information highlighted at the top of the main sidebar. This will give my users instant information about where the post originates, to (hopefully!) give them confidence about the information they are reading.
So go to Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets. Locate Meks Smart Author in the widget area and drag it to the sidebar. The widget can be configured to suit your requirements, I’ll discuss a few of these below:
Title and Author Name – You should initially consider whether you are a one-man-band, or whether you work in a team. If you are the sole writer you may wish to change ‘Title‘ to ‘About <your name>’ and then disable ‘Display author name‘ If you wish the plugin to detect the author and display the relevant information then select the ‘Automatically detect author‘ checkbox.
Author Description – The widget can display an author description that is pulled from Dashboard > Users > Your Profile. You may have an extended description that appears on your author page, which may be too long for the sidebar. In this case, I’d suggest you use the Limit Description field and enter the number of characters equal to your first paragraph, for example.
Author & Avatar Links – We can use these to links to our author page, or we can redirect to another site. If you use both an author name and a widget title the author link will work. If you change the widget title, as I have done, you will only have a clickable avatar. Unfortunately, the widget strips out HTML from the title field so this can not be linked.
Here are the settings I’ve used on this site:
