How do I change author permalink from username to display_name?

Of course! Don’t. Nice names are there for a reason; there are plenty of characters (blank space, apostrophe, extended ASCII characters, and non-ASCII characters) that are illegal in URLs. You could URL-encode them to make them legal, but it would make your pretty URLs quite messy. If you want to show something like:

yourblog.com/author/Strange Attractor/

it will have to be rendered as

yourblog.com/author/Strange%20Attractor/

If you happen to have an author whose name contains extended ASCII or non-ASCII characters, it’s going to get even uglier. For example, this:

yourblog.com/author/Fran?ois Rabelais/

would be rendered as

yourblog.com/author/Fran%C3%A7ois%20Rabelais/

Do you really love aggravation that much? :)

Well, actually, it would be ok if I could set up something to strip out the spaces and make it a nicename.

What I really want is a nicename based on the display_name rather than the username.

I don’t want the usernames to be part of the URL, partly for security, and partly because the admin username(s) are not similar to the display names on the site.

What I really want is a nicename based on the display_name rather than the username.

In that case, all you need to do is to edit the nice name directly in the database…

Ah, good idea! Thanks! That would work in this case because there are only a few of the nicenames I want to change.

But I would still like to know if there’s one specific piece of code that can be changed to force nicenames to be based on the display name.

But I guess that also creates the issue of nicenames possibly not being unique — what happens if they are not?

Try it out and say me whether the world still exists ?? . Here is the code you have to change to use only the display name (for WP Version 2.6) – make a backup first:

/wp-includes/author-template.php about l. 416
replace

if ( '' == $author_nicename ) {
			$user = get_userdata($author_id);
			if ( !empty($user->user_nicename) )
				$author_nicename = $user->user_nicename;
		}
		$link = str_replace('%author%', $author_nicename, $link);

with

$user = get_userdata($author_id);

		$link = str_replace('%author%', $user->display_name, $link);

/wp-includes/link-template.php about l. 95
replace
$author = $authordata->author_nicename;

with
$author = $authordata->display_name;

/wp-includes/query.php about l. 1235
replace
$q['author'] = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->users WHERE user_nicename='".$q['author_name']."'");

with
$q['author'] = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->users WHERE display_name='".$q['author_name']."'");

/wp-includes/general-template.php about l. 211
replace
$title = $wpdb->get_var($wpdb->prepare("SELECT display_name FROM $wpdb->users WHERE user_nicename = %s", $author_name));

with
$title = $wpdb->get_var($wpdb->prepare("SELECT display_name FROM $wpdb->users WHERE display_name = %s", $author_name));

Could anyone pack this into a plugin? It would be useful if you also can change user_nicename manually directly in wordpress’ backend. So, my idea for a new plugin! ??

Viele Grü?e aus Germany and sorry for my b?d English!

Hi acrylschaf,
Thanks for your suggestion. It looks very ingeniuos. I have tried your solution using nickname instead of display_name. Nickname is a bit less risky than display_name.

Guess what … I’ve got it working that the link indeed DOES show the nickname. However, I am getting an 404 error message ‘link not found’. I have updated the permalink structure by clicking ‘save’ so this is not the issue … any idea why it doesn’t work? Everything looks so close to being successful … ??

Yes a plugin for updating the user nicename would be nice as well. I’m also struggling to get the author archives to point to a sanitized nickname or perhaps have a plugin that lets you edit the author nicename directly. /author/jonathandoe891156 is not exactly a very nice author url IMHO.

Though the title of the wp-hackers thread is a bit misleading, a pertinent thread. Need to read through both threads:
https://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-hackers/2008-October/022027.html:
https://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-hackers/2008-October/022044.html

Hi all,

is there any way i can make the author url like https://www.example.com/review/author/%5BUSER_ID%5D instead of using user_nicename or display_name??

the reason i want to do this is because authors in my site can change their user_nicename( nickname inside the site), so i want to rely on the ID instead of the user_nicename that can change anytime..

Thx you.

Though the title of the wp-hackers thread is a bit misleading, a pertinent thread. Need to read through both threads:
https://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-hackers/2008-October/022027.html:
https://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-hackers/2008-October/022044.html

Is there any other way to change the user_nicename than changing it in the database directly?

Worked well – changed the user_nicename value in the users table in the database. I used a dash to avoid the space turning into %20.
I can’t figure out why we get to choose a preferred screen name but the author name defaults to our login username.

Thanks to Anonymous – your solution worked just fine.

Now have to go and sort out the same thing on a few client sites, as I hadn’t noticed that pretty permalinks let the whole world know your login name. Grrr.

Hi All,

is there any way i can make the author url like https://www.myblog.com/author_name instead https://www.myblog.com/author/author_name

Please help Me…!!

Thnx..

I have the same question as Sabin_metric. I’d really like to get rid of the “author” and just have domain.com/username. Anyone have any ideas?

found the answer to my question here https://crrrg.com/removing-the-author-base-in-wordpress/