Cannot change author slug in user-edit

@thamind,

You’re welcome ??

What are your Edit Author Slug settings?

What other plugins do you have installed?

Edit Author Slug has pretty robust error checking, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t holes. That fact that no changes are made and no error is reported suggests to me that something else is interfering.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Author Base: author
Role-Based Author Base: Unchecked
Automatically Update: Unchecked
Bulk Update: Unchecked

I have quite a bit of plugins active currently:

Akismet

AMP

Block Bad Queries (BBQ)

Contact Form 7

Disable REST API

Edit Author Slug

Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP

Google Author Link

Google Plus Authorship

Google XML Sitemaps

Instagram Slider Widget

iThemes Security Pro

ManageWP – Worker

No Category Base (WPML)

Opengraph and Microdata Generator

Peter’s Blog URL Shortcodes

Redirection

Regenerate Thumbnails

Restore Link Title Field

SEO Rank Reporter

Simple Local Avatars

Single Post Template

Sucuri Security – Auditing, Malware Scanner and Hardening

Vafpress Post Formats UI

W3 Total Cache

WordPress Importer

WP Force Lowercase URLs

WP Google Fonts

WP Gravatar Https

WP Hide Post

WP Missed Schedule

WP Post Template

Yoast SEO Premium

So this is an issue with iThemes Security. Looks like you’re using the Force Unique Nickname setting.

The Force Unique Nickname is actually forcing your author slug (user_nicename) to be different than your use login, by using a user’s Nickname to create the author slug. If a user’s Nickname is not set, it attempts to use the user’s first and last name to create the user’s author slug.

In this case, you’re setting the user’s author slug to be firstname-l, which is successful. However, the iThemes code is running right after, and setting it back to either the user’s nickname or firstname-lastname.

I hate to tell you to disable that setting, as it is useful. However, as of now there’s no way to get around it without getting your hands a little dirty with some code. If you’re comfortable with code, I can let you know what to do.

Hi Brandon,

That’s excellent you can identify the issue here! I am well versed in coding, and this is being used on a large scale, high-traffic web site, so any code-based solution I am willing to try out. I will let you know the outcome if I get this working, and I would be so grateful if you could provide me the fix!

Thanks again!

Place the below code in your theme’s functions.php or in a functionality plugin. Note that the below code assumes you’re running PHP 5.3 or above.

add_action( 'init', function () {
	if ( 10 === has_action( 'user_profile_update_errors', 'ba_eas_update_user_nicename' ) ) {
		remove_action( 'user_profile_update_errors', 'ba_eas_update_user_nicename', 10 );
		add_action( 'user_profile_update_errors', 'ba_eas_update_user_nicename', 20, 3 );
	}
} );

The above code is just checking to see if the Edit Author Slug hook exists — this makes it easier for me to add iThemes Support at a later time, without the above code causing issues. If the hook exists, remove it. Then add it back to run after iThemes Security has run it’s code.

Hi Brandon,

That seems to be working just fine. We also found it to work if we used the nickname same as the author slug. Following are few questions that we have:

1. As we are not using Nickname anywhere on the site, so in a longer run would it be better to use the code that you have provided or use the nickname approach that we found to be working?
2. Considering that you might release an upgrade for the iThemes support, do you think the above code might interfere later when we have installed the plugin update? In case we decide to move forward with the changes to functions file, would we need to remove this code once a plugin update that fixes this issues is out.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by saurabhmob.

Both of your questions were answered in earlier replies, but I’ve answered them again, below.

1. As we are not using Nickname anywhere on the site, so in a longer run would it be better to use the code that you have provided or use the nickname approach that we found to be working?

That’s up to you. If you go with using the Nickname, there’s no reason to use Edit Author Slug. Setting the author slug to nickname, with a fallback to firstname-lastname, is the default behavior for iThemes Security. This is why it appeared to “work.” Edit Author Slug still wasn’t the one making the changes.

2. Considering that you might release an upgrade for the iThemes support, do you think the above code might interfere later when we have installed the plugin update? In case we decide to move forward with the changes to functions file, would we need to remove this code once a plugin update that fixes this issues is out.

No. It was written to not interfere. Now, or in the future. It’s always a good idea to not run code you don’t need, but the above code is light in weight.