Author archive pages

Hi Jamie,

Author archives are a built-in WordPress feature already supported by Mission News. I will be adding an option to link the byline in the future, but there is another option added in the last version as well:

Visit the Customizer, open the “Show/Hide Elements” section, click on “Posts,” and you’ll find this option to show a link to the author’s archive in the box after the post content: https://share.getcloudapp.com/E0uEblg4

Thanks for this info, @bensibley. I’ve gone ahead and done that, but the link seems to be giving me a 404. Any ideas?

Try visiting the permalinks page and resaving your existing settings. This is a trick that often fixes random 404 errors on archive pages.

No that didn’t seem to do the trick.

Thanks for trying that.

A 404 error means that either the URL is incorrect or the content for that page is not being returned. In this case, Mission News is using a basic WP function to retrieve the URL, so we know that part is correct. Since I can’t recreate this issue on my test site, it means there is something in the WP settings or a plugin causing the error.

I’m also seeing 404 errors on date archive URLs that WordPress normally creates. This should list all posts published in November: https://www.cardiffreview.com/post/2019/11

You might want to try deactivating your plugins temporarily, but I think the issue may be with the permalink structure itself. Could you let me know what you have set currently in the Permalinks menu?

Thanks, @bensibley. Right now, my permalinks are set to

https://www.cardiffreview.com/post/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

And this was necessary because I moved my site from Wix to WordPress and needed the permalinks to be the same.

Though the author pages seems to be trying a different permalink structure of:

https://www.cardiffreview.com/post/author/%authorname%/

Okay the Wix transfer makes sense. I think the permalink structure for the authors is good the way it is since it keeps “/post/” in the URL.

I think the underlying issue could be with how the user profiles were imported. In your admin dashboard, visit one of the user’s profiles and check to make sure their username matches what shows up in the archive URLs. Additionally, when you’re viewing a user’s profile, click the save button and then check if the archive page works. I have had issues with WP when importing in the past where content shows up but needs to be saved again to fully work.

Hey @bensibley. That didn’t seem to work either. I downloaded a plugin that let’s me change the slug for each user so that I could match it to the URL but no luck. I’m wondering if the issue is the “post/author” section of the URL.

Let me know if you have any other ideas.

I’m afraid I’m out of ideas on this one. The category and tag archives work fine so it’s just the date and author archives that are providing 404s. The last thing I would try out is to look through your plugins – maybe an option to disable these archives was used in the past and left turned on.