passing WordPress fields to data layer

ok, this is driving me mental. this is the most basic thing in the world. and there is no help for it anywhere unless you’re a qualified programmer.

i am trying to pass my blog post info to google tag manager data layer but none of the functions work the way the documentation isnsits they do.

problems – nothing will pass any tag information, none of the suggested syntaxes work.
can only pass author id as “1” (useless) – refusing to pass the author name full stop.

this is my code…
<script>
datalayer.push({
‘month’: ‘<?php echo date(‘n’); ?>’,
‘year’: ‘<?php echo date(‘y’); ?>’,
‘author’: ‘<?php get_the_author(); ?>’,
‘tags’: <?php the_tags(); ?>
<?php
$categories = get_the_category();
$separator = ‘, ‘;
$output = ”;
if ( ! empty( $categories ) ) {
foreach( $categories as $category ) {
$output .= esc_html( $category->name ) . $separator;
}
echo “‘categories’:'” . trim($output, $separator) . “‘”;
}
?>
});
</script>

so tags doesn’t even create a blank variable in the data layer wtf, although it does create the author variable, and simply refuses to populate it.
if you change it to echo the_author(), the entire code breaks and we get no data layer values whatsoever.
but if you change it to <?php get_the_author(); ?>’, we get the author field as blank. if we use get_the_author_meta then it returns a value of 1, get_the_modified_author also returns blank

why have all these similarly named and functioning field and no comparative document that shows how each is supposed to be used. i can’t even find anyone else’s code for doing this to copy and paste wtf?

and these are all the versions of any sort of proper syntax that are discoverable anywhere online and you seem to specifically need to be an actual coder to perform this extremely rudimentary function, and the online documentation around this is supremely unhelpful unless you already know the answer, and i just fume with rage at corporations that force me to interface with them like this. no help, no suppport, ask the community, see if anyone can be bothered replying. wait wait wait, never mind if this has created a critical issue on your website because the support documentation is inadequate, just sit there in the dark mushroom until some actual human being not actually even employed by the corporation that caused the problem volunteers to fix the issue in their spare time out of the goodness of their heart.

i am not an idiot. i know enough that i should never need help from the community if the help files are written by someone who understands both logic and the english language.

so thank you community for being here. stuff you wordpress for not having a standard help file for “how to pass any of our fields to tag manager”

this just m,akes me so angry. nobody should even be using wordpress without this information going to their analytics. wordpress should have fields that just output what they flipping say they are. if get_the_author doesn’t get the author, what the hell does it actually do??

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]