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In last week’s Feature of the Week Post I looked at controlling user options and how to enable (and restrict) what each user can do and access in WordPress and Catalyst Theme.
In this week’s post I’m going to cover some additional user related options provided by Catalyst Theme.
User/Author Biographical Information
Providing background and biographical information about the author(s) of the content on your site can be a powerful aid to increasing its authority and how it is perceived by visitors who view it.
There are three significant areas where such biographical information can be provided.
The first is at the end of a Post.
A field called Biographical Info is provided for each WordPress User Profile (in WordPress > Users > ‘User’ > About Yourself).
User Profile Biographical Info
The content provided here will be displayed at the end of each Post written by that Author.
This Author Information Box can be fully styled for added visual impact using the Author Options in Dynamik as shown below.
The text for the link at the end of the bio box can also be set using the Post Author Box Link Text in the Catalyst Core Options > Content > Content Meta Options area.
The Author Information Box – After Styling in Dynamik
As well as, or instead of, displaying author information at the end of every Post, Catalyst also provides an option to provide an Author Archive Description at the head of each Author’s Archive page (i.e. at the head of all the Posts written by a particular author).
Catalyst Author Archive Options
The option for this can also be found just underneath the Biographical Info fields mentioned above in WordPress > Users > ‘User’ > Catalyst Author Archive Options.
The result immediately conveys information about the author to the visitor. Being near the top of the page content, this also provides a useful opportunity to include relevant keywords about the author, and their field of expertise, for additional search engine benefit.
Author Archive Page Information
The third option I’ll cover in this week’s post is the Catalyst Author Bio Widget.
This widget can be found in the WordPress > Appearance > Widgets and can be included in any widget area you wish – such as a Sidebar, EZ Widget area or Custom Widget Area.
This widget will display the same text as the Biographical Information field in the selected user’s profile – unless an alternative description is provided in the text box in this widget.
Catalyst Author Bio Widget
If desired this widget can also be used to include a link to another Page, and so provide more details about that specific user (perhaps a full page biography or resume etc), along with the user’s Gravator etc.
Here we’ve included it in an EZ Feature Top Widget Area (the right hand widget in this case) on the Homepage in this instance.
Catalyst Author Bio Widget Included in an EZ Feature Top Widget Area
As is so often the case with most things in Catalyst Theme, the options for providing author’s biographical information are comprehensively catered for and provide plenty of choice for how you might wish to implement this useful feature.
Have fun
David
David Pritchard is the author of the Catalyst Theme Cheat Sheet – the 250+ page guide that helps users make the most of Catalyst Theme. Licenced Catalyst Theme users can get their FREE copy in the downloads section of the Catalyst Theme forum. David also has a site with guides to using Catalyst Theme, WordPress, SEO, internet marketing techniques and other topics at http://www.FastStepInternetMarketing.com
Hey David,
It would have been awesome if you could have explained how to use this to have your google+ profile displayed in the SERPs as the “Author” of the post.
I think it has something to do with linking your blog author page to your google+ profile but I’ve never done it with Catalyst.
Hopefully you can explain us how to do this with Catalyst.
Cheers,
There are a couple of ways to do this.
* Note: You must have a link to your website root domain from your Google+ page for any option to work properly.
1) Have a link to your Google+ page and at the end of the link, include ?rel=author or ?rel=publisher. So the link may look something like Google+
2) In the header section of your Catalyst theme, somewhere in between the and tags, just include a simple snippet like this:
or
Jason
Hi Benjamin
Although I guess that’s not strictly a ‘feature’ of Catalyst, I think that’s a great idea for a future post and I’ll look to do one to include that sometime soon.
In the meantime, it’s probably a good one to ask in the forum….
Best
David
Hello David;
How can I get different authors-bios?
For example if I don’t want the bio-profile to show on some pages I use my author 1 where the profile is blank. Then I created a 2nd user – with author bio-profile. I associated the second author to all pages and posts I wanted the bio-profile to show up. But If you notice on my biography page even though its linked to author 1 – author 2 is still showing up on the page?
Thanks
Loretta
David,
I have a similar problem to Loretta, I have a number of Authors in the blog on the above website but when I used the Catalyst Author Bio widget associated for each author, only the first author bio would appear no matter who wrote the particular post. Is there a way to solve this problem?
Hi Michael (and Loretta – sorry I missed your comment previously)….
I’ve just checked this through and it seems to work fine…
On my test site at http://www.CatalystThemeGuide.com I just created a second user – called USER 2 – with Author Role.
I added the Catalyst Author Bio widget with specific text into an EZ widget area on the home page – next to the one for the original user – that works ok.
In the WP > Users > Profile Settings for the USER 2 profile I added a description in the WP About Yourself – Biographical Info Box – that appears after each post written by that user…
Also in the WP > User > Profile Settings I also added a description in the Catalyst Author Archive Options > Author Archive Description box – that appears at the top of that Author’s Archive Page.
Both seem to work fine with the info for USER 2 displayed correctly. Check out the home page of the test site to see the Catalyst Author Bio Widget – and check out the Blog Page for the Test Post by USER 2 – click on the Post Heading to open the post and see the Bio info box underneath the post and click on the Author link in the Post Byline data to see the Author Archive Page info.
So it works fine. But doesn’t answer your query(ies) directly…
One obvious thing to check is that the right Author is selected in the Catalyst Author Bio Widget if you’re using that…
Otherwise I’d suggest raising it in the support forum to get it investigated as that’s really the best place for queries like this.
Hope that helps a little – (and sorry for the late response Loretta)
Best
David
Hey David,
I’d like to ad another link on the author bio except of the “read more” link. Seems like adding HTML in the bio widget is not really working. Any other way to solve this issue?
Thanks,
Shlomo
Hey Shlomo,
Be sure to post the more support related questions like these in our forum as that’s a more ideal place to provide an answer.
Eric