Have you ever wanted to allow users to subscribe to specific authors on WordPress? If you have a multi-authored WordPress site, your users may want to subscribe to their specific author. In this tutorial, we will show you how to allow users to subscribe to individual authors on WordPress.

Why add a subscription feature on WordPress?

Most large multi-author blogs like "Huffington" allow users to follow their favorite authors. You can offer this feature to your WordPress blog also.

WordPress generates an RSS feed for all authors, categories, tags, custom post formats, and comments on your site. However, users can not easily access these links.

As a site owner, you will just need to add links and subscription options so that users can subscribe to the authors.

That said, let's take a look at this method that will allow you to allow author subscriptions on your WordPress blog.

How to add an authoring subscription feature on WordPress

All authors on your WordPress site have a unique RSS feed. This RSS feed is located in a URL similar to the following:

http://www.example.com/author/herve/feed/

Remember to replace 'herve' with the name of an existing author on your site.

Many WordPress themes features a section that displays author biographical information at the end of the article. You can add this HTML code in the author's bio section to display a link to their RSS feed.

Subcribe Tom's Posts

You can also automatically generate the link and use a shortcode to manually insert it into the articles.

First you need to add this code to your WordPress Plugin.

// Function to generate author's RSS feed link function bpc_author_feed () {$ authorfeed = get_author_feed_link (get_the_author_id (), ''); $ authorfeedlink = ' Subscribe to articles from'. get_the_author_meta ('display_name'). ''; return $ authorfeedlink; } // Create a shortcode to display the link add_shortcode ('authorfeed', 'bpc_author_feed'); // Enable shortcode execution in WordPress text widgets add_filter ('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

You can now simply use the [authorfeed] shortcode in your articles, and it will automatically generate a link to the author's RSS feed. Feel free to customize the text you want to display for the link.

How to add a subscription link on the sidebar

We are going to use the shortcode method we showed above to display an author's subscription on WordPress. Just go to the location " Appearance> Widgets , And add a text widget to your sidebar.

You will need to add the [authorfeed] shortcode in the widget text box. After that, don't forget to save your widget. You can now visit your site to see the subscribe button in action.

The problem with this method is that it displays the widget on every page, including homepage, category and archive, etc.

You need to install and activate the plugin « Display Widgets ". For more details see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress Plugin. After activation, you need to visit Widgets location and edit widget “ Feed And choose where you want to display the widget.

You will notice new options to control the widget display on different pages of your site. Now you have to select " Show is checked pages Then check the single item.

Do not forget to click on the button « save » to save the widget settings. That's all for this tutorial. I hope you can display a subscribe button on your WordPress blog.