Author Credit in Article

I’ve been looking at various ways to get Author Credits done in an article. I’ve found a couple:

https://magazine-news.com/category-10/filler-post-8

https://www.wpzoom.com/yamidoo/demo/author/admin/

The first one gets it done in the article on the side bar, which is nice, the second on a follow up author page which lists all the articles, which I also know how to do. There are a couple of issues:

(1) From what I know, there is no easy way to put in an author picture. This should be standard but for now it pulls in the gravatar image, which most of my users don’t use and don’t even know what it is. I’ve used various neat plugins but some require hacks, which I don’t like, in order to get it to work properly. There is one that is rather extensive but you need to mod several files to get it to work.

(2) I was wondering how to pull up the author page on a sidebar like it is right now. I like the way it looks on the first example. I guess it’s a matter of some css but also an if statement which will populate that area.

Anyone who has done author pages and/or author credit within articles, it would be greatly appreciated to see what you’ve done and can share. I’ve made some of my own but never seem satisfied. This is one weak area in WP, IMHO, where authors are extremely important but not getting their due!