This week, one user asked us about an interesting WordPress problem.
They could not see the Author option when they were writing posts. This is how the Author dropdown normally appears:
1. You only have one Author
They only had one user who was in a user role with the ability to write posts.
They were an “Administrator”. However, all of the other users on the site were “Subscribers” and did not have any permission to write posts.
Because there is only one possible author for each post, WordPress automatically hides the “Authors” feature.
There is one caveat: it is possible for the “Authors” feature to appear if someone else is chosen as an Author, but has now been moved to the “Subscriber” role.
For more details on the default user roles on how this can happen, check out these links.
2. You are a Subscriber or Contributor
The Subscriber and Contributor roles are the lowest two roles in WordPress. They have the fewest permissions.
Subscribers can not write or edit any content. So they can not even access the “Posts” screen, let alone see the Authors box.
Contributors can write content, but they only have access to their own Posts. They are now allowed to interact with content written by other users. So they are also denied access to the Authors box.
If you want to allow a role like Contributors to see the Authors box, you can give do this by giving them the “Edit Others” permission. You can do this with the PublishPress Capabilities plugin.
Multiple Authors metabox is superior to WordPress’s not just because of it’s ability to select many users and showing an avatar, but also because of ease/concise display. When you have thousands of users it would be much harder to find on WP’s default dropdown due to scrolling a huge list versus Multiple Author’s AJAX search results.