As you may have seen I have a guest post on this blog written by Matt from phuketvogue.com. Since I am the only registered writer/author on this site, all posts are marked as ‘written by Toxane’ or something similar. I thought it would be just fair for the guest writer, to mark these posts with the corresponding author name and a link back to the author’s site.

What I didn’t want was to have the guest authors as registered WordPress users on my blog, just to keep things simple (and save). I came up with the following solution:

In my theme folder I have my ‘functions.php’ file and I added the following code to it:

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// Guest Posts
function theAuthor()
{
	$guestName = get_post_custom_values("guestName");
	$guestLink = get_post_custom_values("guestLink");
 
	if ($guestName)
	{
		if ($guestLink)
		{
			echo '<a href="'.$guestLink[0].'" target="_blank">'.$guestName[0].'</a>';
		}
		else
		{
			echo $guestName[0];
		}
	}
	else
	{
		the_author();
	}
}

The code checks if the post has a custom field ‘guestName’. If the field is found, the code further checks if there’s a custom field ‘guestLink’. If that field is found as well, the code returns the name of the guest author as a hyperlink back to the guest authors website. If there’s no ‘guestLink’, only the guest author’s name is returned. If both custom fields are missing, the code returns ‘the_author()’ which is the registered WordPress user.

Next I replaced all occurences of ‘the_author()’ in the theme files with ‘theAuthor()’

To mark any post in your WordPress Blog as a guest post, you just add a custom field ‘guestName’ and the name of the guest author as value. If you want the guest author’s name appears as a hyperlink, just add a custom field ‘guestLink’ and the web address of the guest author as value.

That’s it. Simple and fair for your guest author(s).