Author Box Avatars for Co-Authors Plus Guest Authors

[Dan]

I'm using Minimum Pro -- latest release with the latest release of the Genesis framework.

I have Co-Authors Plus and Genesis Co-Authors Plus installed and active.

Problem: Author boxes for guest users generated with Co-Authors Plus never include an avatar even if one is supplied as the "featured image" for the Guest Author CPT. Only authors with user accounts and avatars tied to their user accounts have their avatars appear in author boxes.

I would like to be able to provide avatars for guest authors too.

Is there a known/preferred solution for this?

[AnitaC]

The developers of the plugin indicates that the featured image should work as of their update 3.0.1 (Nov. 21, 2012). If it's not, you should probably post this over on their support page - http://wordpress.org/plugins/co-authors-plus/changelog/.

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[Dan]

Daniel Bachhuber is no longer involved with Co-Authors Plus, and none of the other developers have been responding in the support forum for many months. My guess is that since Automattic took it over co-author functionality is going to show up in Jetpack at some point, and these plugins will languish unless someone else forks them.

The Genesis plugin for Co-Authors Plus is probably the more relevant place to seek support, so I posted my question there, but I see the developer, Jean Galea, has not been responding in those forums for many months either.

In my experience Co-Authors Plus has never worked very well, and this is largely because there is no standard for handling authors in WordPress themes. Every solution is essentially a hack because the WordPress core forces an inadequate de facto standard on us where Users=Authors. Without the ability to map more than one user to a piece of content and no way to quickly create new "dummy" users without email addresses or access rights, it would make the most sense to standardize non-user authors as a custom content type or a taxonomy as the Byline plugin does. This is an area where a well-supported solution would likely be well-received and profitable.

[Summer]

I have been using both these plugins on several sites, and the featured image for non-linked accounts does work.

I had previously been using Simple Local Avatars to get author images to appear, but I don't have to use it anymore. I also had to hack Genesis Co-Authors Plus to get something else to work properly, but I think that's been fixed in a newer version.

I hope you're wrong about Co-Authors Plus being consumed by Jetpack... I hate Jetpack and won't use it, so that would be bad for several of my sites 😛

And yes, there needs to be a better way to provide bylines without providing user accounts, and the sooner the better.

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