* Photo by Michael Fertig

Authors in WordPress have a homepage url like http://domain.com/author/authorname where all their posts are shown. And many of us who think it doesn’t look attractive want to change that url format. The middle part of that url, which says author, is called an author_base and it is possible to change this using some rewrite rules and filters. Let’s get our hand dirty 🙂

Modifying the permalink

To change the author base in permalink, you need to use the global $wp_rewrite class, like this

[code lang=php]
add_action("init","change_author_base_in_permalink");
function change_author_base_in_permalink() {
global $wp_rewrite;
$wp_rewrite->author_base = "users";
$wp_rewrite->flush_rules();
}
[/code]

Now, as soon as you visit http://domain.com/author/authorname you will see that it’s a 404. Good, eh? At the same time, this link http://domain.com/users/authorname will display all the posts for this particular user.

If you want to revert this change and go back to the old url structure, then all you have to do is comment that action, and then flush the permalink for once.

Other fixes

There is one small problem. Though the new permalink has been effective, but get_author_posts_url() still returns an url with the old format. So we need to fix that part too. Luckily, there is a filter 🙂

[code lang=php]
add_filter("author_link","fix_author_link");
function fix_author_link($link){
if($link){
return str_replace("author","users",$link);
}
}
[/code]

That’s mainly it. I hope you find this article useful.