Most themes do not come with a dedicated page for authors. Under the Template Hierarchy, WordPress will instead look for an archives.php template or an index.php template if an author.php template is not found in the theme directory. This means that the summary of an authors posts will be shown in exactly the same way that monthly and category archives are shown. Although this way shows all of the authors previous posts, it doesn't tell you much about the author themselves. If you have many authors writing for your blog, you should perhaps consider creating a dedicated authors page for them in order to give them more exposure.

Creating the Authors page

We start by creating a file called author.php. It is important that the file has this exact name as WordPress looks for that before archives.php and index.php. The most common way of developing an authors page is by using a variable called $curauth (an abbreviation of Current Author). This is the method which WordPress itself promotes. So to start we need to set this variable so that WordPress can call up the correct information for our user. The code below needs to be placed in our template before the WordPress Loop. <?php

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