The Custom Guest Authors plugin (developed and maintained by Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi) lets you replace the WordPress post author display name with one or more custom guest author names, stored as post meta. No separate WordPress user accounts are required. Ideal for sites that publish content from external contributors, translators, or collaborative authors.

Guest author names are set directly from the post editor via a dedicated sidebar panel — available in both the classic editor and the Gutenberg block editor. The raw guest-author custom field key also works for programmatic or WP-CLI workflows.

This plugin was inspired by a tutorial from WPBeginner.

Features

Author name override

• Replaces the WordPress post author name with a custom guest author name on the front end.
• Supports multiple authors — enter names separated by commas (e.g. John Doe, Jane Smith).
• Three join styles for multi-author display: Natural (A, B and C), Comma (A, B, C), Ampersand (A & B & C).
• Optional site-wide fallback name shown on posts with no per-post guest author set.
• Works with both classic themes (via the_author filter) and block/FSE themes (via get_the_author_display_name filter).

Post type support

• Applies to any combination of public post types — Posts, Pages, and any registered custom post type.
• Post type selection is configurable from the General tab in Settings.

Display control

• Apply the override everywhere (singles, archives, feeds) or restrict it to single post views only.
• Author archive links are automatically suppressed when a guest author is active — guest authors are not WordPress users and have no author archive.

Structured data

• Optional suppression of the author property from JSON-LD schema output.
• Compatible with Yoast SEO (wpseo_schema_graph filter) and Rank Math (rank_math/schema/article filter).

Performance

• Author name lookups are cached per post using WordPress transients (default lifetime: 12 hours, configurable from 1 to 168 hours).
• Cache is invalidated immediately on post save, and on any direct post meta add, update, or delete — including REST API and WP-CLI writes.
• Cache is automatically flushed on plugin update to clear stale entries from older installs.

Settings

Settings are available at Settings › Guest Authors, organised across four tabs:

• General — fallback guest author name, active post types.
• Display — multi-author join style, show override on singular or all views, live preview.
• Advanced — cache lifetime, JSON-LD schema suppression toggle.
• Debug — live diagnostics panel, system information, cache status, and a manual post-ID tester.

Translation

• Bundled Malay (Malaysia) translation (ms_MY).
• All strings are internationalised and ready for translation via a .pot template file.