Author profiles and author pages New

Readers like to know who wrote what. Every person on your team has an author profile: a display name, a round photo and a short bio. Readers see it on your posts, and each writer gets their own author page with all their posts. This works on every plan, Free included.

Click your name at the top of the admin panel and choose My Account. Your profile is the first box on the page.

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1. Drop a photo on the circle, or click it. It is cropped and made smaller for you.
2. The name readers see on posts and on your author page.
3. A short bio, up to 260 characters.
4. Turn this off to hide your author page.

Your name, photo and bio

• Display name is the name readers see on posts, blog cards and the feed. Your login name is never shown on the blog.
• Photo: drop a picture on the circle, or click it and choose one. DonkeyCMS crops it to a circle and makes it small for you, and saves it straight away. To remove it, press the small × on the photo.
• Short bio: up to 260 characters. One or two sentences about who you are and what you write about is plenty.

Press Save to keep the name and bio.

Until you set a display name, the dashboard shows a reminder: Set your display name and photo. Press Set it now to go to your profile, or Later to hide it for now.

Your author page

Every writer with at least one published post gets an author page at an address like yourblog.com/blog/author/maya-brooks. It shows the photo, name, bio and every post that person wrote. The byline on each post links to it, and View author page on My Account opens it.

The page also tells search engines and AI assistants who the writer is, so they can connect your posts to a real person. You do not have to do anything for that.

Prefer to stay in the background? Turn off Public author page. Your name still shows on your posts, just without a link, and your author page is hidden.

Job title, links and the About the author box (Pro plan)

On Pro and above, your profile has more fields:

• Job title, such as "Pastry chef" or "Web designer".
• Links to your website and social profiles: LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and GitHub. They appear as small icons, and search engines use them to recognize you.
• Contact email: a public address readers can write to, shown as an envelope icon. Your login email is never used for this. The address is never written into the page in one piece: it is put together in the reader's browser, which keeps most spam robots away.

An About the author box then appears at the end of every post, with the photo, job title, bio and links.

To turn the box off, open Settings, then Features, and switch off About the author box.

Author pages on Pro also show what each writer writes about: the categories of their posts, worked out by themselves.

Edit a teammate's profile (Pro plan)

If you can manage the team, open Users, then the Team tab, and press Edit profile next to a person to change their display name, photo, bio and links for them. Handy when a colleague is busy and the blog is not. See Team and roles for inviting people.

Guest authors (Pro plan)

A guest author is someone outside your team who wrote a post for you: a supplier, an expert you interviewed, a freelancer. They get credit, a photo, a bio, links and their own author page, labeled as a guest writer. They have no account: they cannot sign in and do not use a seat on your plan.

1. Open Users, then the Guest authors tab, and press Add guest author.
2. Fill in the display name and anything else you know, and press Save. Add the photo after the first save.
3. In the post editor, choose the guest under Shown as author.

The post stays yours: who can edit it does not change. Only the public credit moves to the guest.

Who can add guests: Masters, and anyone whose role has the Manage Guest Authors permission (the built-in Editor role has it). Anyone who can edit a post can credit a guest who already exists. A guest author cannot be deleted while a post still credits them: choose another author for those posts first.

Meet the team page (Business plan)

On Business, your blog can have a page at /team that introduces everyone who writes for it: photo, job title, short bio, number of posts and links, with guest writers in their own section underneath.

Open Settings, then Customizations, and switch on Meet the team page. Give it a Title and a Subtitle, and drag people into the Order you want (the arrows work too). People appear once they have a published post. Author pages and the About the author box link to the page by themselves.

Good to know

• White-label: author profiles work the same on a white-labeled blog; nothing on these pages names DonkeyCMS.
• Backups: profiles, photos and guest authors are part of every backup.
• If your plan ends: display names, photos, bios and author pages keep working on Free. Job titles, links, the contact email, "writes about", the About the author box and the team page stop showing until you renew; nothing is deleted. Posts already credited to a guest keep showing the guest's name.

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