How to Change the Name of a Posts Author

WordPress has a lot of functionality yet provides a fairly easy interface to use. However, by simplifying the interface, there is functionality which is a little bit “hidden” from the user. If you’re like me, new to the WordPress interface, you may find the need to makes some changes which aren’t immediately visible. One such example is changing the Author of a post that I previously made.

In following the WA training, I created initial pages and posts using the default “Admin” user which is created in WordPress when you build a new website. This was fine to get my website started but as it started to take shape, I created a personal account (following WA training) to let the readers know that I’m talking to them and not a cold-feeling “Admin” of the site.

I now submit all of my new posts under a more-personal user account but my original posts were represented as an ‘Admin’ user and I wanted to change the Author of these postings to my personal account. So, I started by the typical editing process:

• Click on ‘Posts’ in the menu.
• Locate the article to be changed and place the cursor over it to see the available tasks.
• Select the ‘Edit’ task to edit the article.

Great, I now have access to change the article, publishing options, categories, and tags. But wait! Where’s the “Author” field? Unfortunately, it’s not there.

After searching around for a while, I found this hidden little gem. Alright, maybe it’s not a gem but I did find how to change the Author of the post and a few other items which may be important in the future.

Changing the Author Field

To change the Author field, you need to approach the post editing process a little differently…

1. Click on ‘Posts’ in the menu to show all of our posts and, if needed, apply date/category filters to shorten the list.
2. Locate the article to be changed and place a checkmark into the checkbox next to that article.
3. In the drop-down list which reads “Bulk Actions”, select “Edit” and then press the “Apply” button.

This will bring up a ‘Bulk Edit’ panel which provides access to multiple properties associated with the post that can now be directly edited without going into the article itself. It is here, that you will find an Author drop-down list from which you can select from any of the website’s authors and apply he or she to the article. Once you’ve made the change to the Author, or other properties, press the “Update” button and you’ll now find the published article authorship shown as this new Author.