Primary author issue

I am having the same issue, not only with custom post types but also regular posts. I believe it started when I last updated the plugin. I’m going to have to roll back to an older version until this issue is fixed.

I don’t recommend rolling back, and won’t be able to support that. In order to use Co-Authors Plus fully, you’ll need to use our template tags.

Using get_coauthors() gives you all of the information that’s available in the standard WP User object.

It’s unrealistic to expect every other plugin we are using to use your special functions rather than the WordPress ones. Other plugins and features that aren’t hooked into your plugin should be able to fall back on working with the main author. By preventing users from changing who is the main author for everything other than your plugin, you’re not playing nice with everyone else.

No one ever recommends rolling back, but it’s not any better to hack my other plugins to use your functions.

It’s unrealistic to expect every other plugin we are using to use your special functions rather than the WordPress ones.

Sorry for the confusion. The point of Co-Authors Plus is to allow you to assign multiple bylines to an article. WordPress doesn’t have native support for multiple bylines — thus the requirement of adding the template tags.

If you want it to work well with other plugins, you or the plugin author will need to add support for Co-Authors Plus. There’s not much I can do because, again, core WordPress doesn’t support multiple bylines. There’s no standard paradigm to follow.

Often, the easiest thing to do (as I have done with my other plugins) is to add a filter to the plugin in question where you can modify the output of the post author. Then, in your theme or an mu plugin, you can filter that output to return Co-Authors Plus instead.

Co-Authors Plus does store the first author on any post type as ‘post_author’ so at least the first byline should persist if the plugin is deactivated.

Hope this helps clarify.

Thanks for the clarification. Let me also clarify.

What we’re saying is that on our sites, the storing of the first author as the WP ‘post_author’ is no longer working.

If user A creates a blog post, and then tries to change the first author to user B, (so user A’s name is no longer associated with the post in any way), all of the WordPress functions will still bring up user A, not user B.

We don’t expect the WP functions to bring up multiple authors, we just need them to bring up the right first author.

I thought you were saying this was intentional. It sounds like you just misunderstood us.

If user A creates a blog post, and then tries to change the first author to user B, (so user A’s name is no longer associated with the post in any way), all of the WordPress functions will still bring up user A, not user B.

Odd. I have a hunch why that may be the case though. Do your users have different user_logins than user_nicenames?

It looks like all the usernames in question have spaces, so yes, I believe they would. (I haven’t actually looked in the database or anything, let me know if you need me to confirm). The site is also a multisite install, in case that makes a difference.

This problem started with Co-Authors Plus 3.0.

Thanks for looking at it!

Ah, it’s probably this issue. I’ll try to test and merge to the development version tomorrow (which you can use until there’s a new release out.

Yep, same situation with usernames and nicenames for me.

Can you guys try installing the development version to see if that fixes it for you?

Sorry, the bug is still there.

I’m having a heck of a time trying to reproduce this with the dev version of the plugin.

Here’s what I’m doing:

1. Created a new user with user_login “Daniel Bachhuber” and user_nicename “daniel-bachhuber”
2. Created a new “Event” post and assigned my normal “daniel” user to the post. The post_author value in the database is 1
3. Assigned the “Event” post to my new user with user_login “Daniel Bachhuber”. The post_author value in the database changed to 8

Can you give me steps to take to reproduce reliably?

This seems to be working for us again now. Thanks, Daniel.

The development version seems to have fixed the issue for me too. Thanks

Since it was working for other people I tried it again, in case I made a mistake and uploaded the wrong files or something. It’s also working for me now.

Sorry for the mistake, thanks a lot for following up and fixing this.