Custom Fields (ACF) for Author

We’re glad you’re loving the plugin, maxxnz!

Ah, you make an interesting point. Indeed, the plugin currently doesn’t support this level of customization. At first read, I was hoping that we’d be able to resolve your scenario by specifying custom Rules for how to parse the body of the post/page. (If you’re interested in more information, our plugin makes use of the Facebook Instant Articles SDK for PHP which includes a Transformer that does all the heavy lifting — our Quick Start guide contains details about how it works.)

I’ll discuss with my team to see if it would be at possible/feasible to broaden the rules somehow in order to customize data (such as the Author) to be acquired from something other than the actual user account who created/modified the post.

I’m marking this as resolved for the time being, however, since the functionality requested currently isn’t supported.

Hope this helps.

The solution below expects an ACF checkbox option custom_author. If this is set to false the default WordPress author will be used, otherwise we populate the author object with values from ACF.

The below snippet can be placed in your theme’s functions.php file.

add_filter( 'instant_articles_authors', 'modify_instant_articles_authors', 50, 2 );

function modify_instant_articles_authors( $authors, $post_id ) {
    if ( get_field( 'custom_author', $post_id ) ) {
        $authors = array();
        $author = (object) [];
            $author->display_name = get_field( 'author_name', $post_id );
            $author->user_url = get_field( 'author_url', $post_id );
            $author->bio = get_field( 'author_bio', $post_id );
        $authors[] = $author;
    }
    return $authors;
}