: How do I create a Wordpress author alias? I manage the blog for my company and essentially act as the editor for the posts that come in. Once they have been reviewed and approved, I load

@Cugini213

In my opinion - since I'm guessing you're not using the author name as a link to the authors posts, and you only want to use this for display purposes - you could just setup a Custom Field and use that as the Authors name for display purposes.

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@Speyer207

WordPress has a lot of userful plugins and well yes some can hog resources while some only run when you want them too. You can install a plugin to change the username and then disable the plugin or simply remove it, most plugins that do SQL changes will not revert the settings back once your uninstall it.

Method 1. Users > Your Profile

Your administration profile found under Users > Your Profile has various fields and the ones to look out for are:


First Name
Second Name
Nickname
Display Name


You can change the display name by setting a nick name, this will display the author as your nickname however it will not change the URL /user/username/ as you may already know.

Method 2. Screen Options > Author

The easiest method would to simply add another user to your WordPress site, this can be another administrator or just a contributor. Use the username that you would like the URL alias to appear as, this can't be changed without SQL intervention at a later date, however the display name can.

And if your wondering how to switch the authorship of an page or post this can be done by viewing the post or page that you want to change ownership and then at the top right click screen options, then check author, as by default this is disabled in the view. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page your now see an option to change authorship.

If you decide to go ahead with this method and you plan never to login into the author account then I recommend you set a whopping 256 character long password, any longer your browser will most likely struggle as it does on mine. I use Passwords Generator and click unbelievable 256.

Method 3. wp_users > user_login

You can change the username of any account by editing your SQL database. Using the commandline or phpmyadmin click wp_users then look for user_login and click it. Change the value from your username to whatever you would like. This hopefully will update all the URLS, if it doesn't then do a SQL database search and replace for all traces of your username, if you used 'admin' then you can't do this as your most likely do damage to your WordPress install.

Method 4. Plugin username-changer

If you can't be bothered with any of the methods listed above then you can use a one time only username changer plugin and remove it. Your find plenty of these on WordPress plugin library.

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