Daniel Greene

WordPress themes not showing author bylines explained

The other day, I expressed my concern on the WordPress Support Forums that my author bylines were gone from my posts in this blog using the Twenty Twelve theme. Today I got a response from staff explaining that, because of feedback from the WordPress community, they started using CSS (the style markup that composes the themes) to hide the author byline on some, but not all, themes. This makes the byline invisible in the normal, theme/CSS-enabled view, but if you view the page without the theme/CSS you will see the bylines.

Screenshot courtesy of Josh, a WordPress Happiness Engineer
Screenshot courtesy of Josh, a WordPress Happiness Engineer

This means the search engines can read the bylines and verify authorship. I checked this with Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool and found the search engine did, in fact, read my byline and verify my authorship. This is good to know!

For anyone who knows HTML and CSS and is curious, here is the HTML:

<span class="by-author"> by <a title="View all posts by Daniel Greene" href="https://danielgreene.com/author/danielgreene/" rel="author">Daniel Greene</a></span>

And here is the CSS that does the trick:

.by-author&nbsp;{display:&nbsp;none;}

If you are interested in viewing the code on your own blog, there are various ways to view source code.

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5 responses to “WordPress themes not showing author bylines explained”

  1. How to bring back the Author Byline in TwentyThirteen | The WP Guru Avatar
    How to bring back the Author Byline in TwentyThirteen | The WP Guru

    […] to David Greene and P. Chandra for bringing this to my […]

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  2. Blog 2014: Free WordPress themes that display bylines | Daniel Greene Avatar
    Blog 2014: Free WordPress themes that display bylines | Daniel Greene

    […] author’s name is a matter of style, not content. As I wrote in WordPress themes not showing author bylines explained, the author’s byline is on every WordPress post and posts page. It is always there in the […]

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  3. Hey I’m using a new WordPress theme | Review Geek

    […] “Posted on..” line below the entry title was completely removed which kind of pissed me off. WordPress said they polled some bloggers who suggested the date and author wasn’t needed to be displayed after the title unless the blog […]

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  4. Bill Brent Avatar
    Bill Brent

    Daniel,
    I just created a WordPress blog (hosted at Dreamhost) and am using the free Sundance theme. It displays the byline when I click the “Preview” button, to preview a new post. But it does not display a byline in the blog when the post is published. This seems to be the problem you’re speaking of. But I don’t understand your solution to this problem. Your link to “ways to view source code” does not work.

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    1. Daniel Greene Avatar
      Daniel Greene

      The link works, Brent. I notice, though, if you mouse over just so, the tooltip from the code above may block part of it so you can’t click on it. My solution is simply to accept that my byline will not show in certain themes, but it will show to search engines that ignore the style that hides the byline. Google “CSS display:none” to read more.

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