photo credit: steepways

While we're on the topic of WP authors, while I was making my author profile yesterday, I wanted to change the "slug" - the bit in the URL that labels the particular author. By default, the URL of author pages ishttp://domain.com/author/slug

For most users, this "slug" is set to the user name: while you can't change a user name, you might very well want to change the way your name appears in the author page's URL.

To change the name, you'll need to edit the slug directly in the database (through PHPMyAdmin or similar). You need to make two edits:

1. in your users table (probably wp_users), change user_nicename to the new name
2. in your usermeta table (probably wp_usermeta), change id_username for the relevant user (check the ID number) to the same name as above

I can't believe there isn't a plugin to do this, but I can't find one: if no one can leave me a link to a plugin, I'll write one. In the meantime, if you don't want to edit it yourself - drop me a line and I'll do it for you.

If you want to change the "author" part of the URL - to "member" or "user" or "chum", for example - The Author Slug plugin lets you change this.

Tags: authors, WordPress

Posted by Sue on June 28, 2009 in WordPress.