Adding An Author Tag To Posts Automatically

Question

I have been researching how to automatically tag a post by author, so if "Peter Parker" authors a post, that post would automatically show up with a tag "Peter Parker." This is because I will have a multi-author blog with custom post types picked up by various blog rolls, and don't want to leave it up to users to remember to tag themselves in every single post.

I came across this thread that seemed to be asking the same thing as I'm doing now and ended up with the following code:

add_action( 'save_post', 'add_authors_name');
function add_authors_name( $post_id ) {
 global $post;
 $post_author = $post->post_author;  // returns the Author ID
 // get the author's WP_User object so we can get the Author Name
 $post_author_obj = get_userdata( $post_author );
 $post_author_name = $post_author_obj->first_name . ' ' . $post_author_obj->last_name;
 wp_set_post_terms( $post_id, $post_author_name, 'post_tag', true );
 }

I put this in functions.php and it broke my site. I had to login to the hosting company and reset the file through ftp.

I then came across this thread that also provided an acceptable (albeit more messy) approach that would automatically assign authors to specific categories. That lead me to a plugin that someone replied with but that was from 3 years ago and the plugin no longer worked when I tried to install/activate it.

I then searched more on google but only found a freelancer.com link that was requesting this kind of plugin be made.

I would appreciate your help. I've tried to do a good amount of research into this but ended up breaking my site or hit dead ends. Thank you.

edit: As I was able to explain thanks to cybmeta's helpful prompts, I do indeed want to eventually try my hand at customizing author.php, but right now I do not have enough know how to even formulate questions acceptable for stackexchange. This auto-tagging of authors is the last piece of the puzzle for me getting on with my site without coding anything else, so I would be grateful for assistance with that. Thank you so much for your help so far, cybmeta.

Answer 1

Reading your comment, what you want is to create an author archive using tags and customize the author archive pages. You don't need tags or categories for that. There is a built-in author archive, by default the URL is in the format yoursite.com/author/username. That URL will show all posts by author and will use the template hierarchy as you can see here. To customize the author archive you can use the template author.php; if you want to customize the archive for a specific author you can use the template author-{username}.php or author-{usernid}.php.

Also, you can pick up all posts by author using WP_Query, get_posts, etc, for custom queries and loops.

Although I don't get the point of tagging posts with author name, here a working and tested code:

add_action( 'save_post', 'add_authors_name', 10, 2);
function add_authors_name( $post_id, $post ) {

    // Check the post type to apply only to satandard posts.
    // Bypass if the $post is a revision, auto-draft or deleted
    if( $post->post_type == 'post' ) {

        $post_author = $post->post_author;  // returns the Author ID
        // get the author's WP_User object so we can get the Author Name
        $post_author_obj = get_userdata( $post_author );
        $post_author_name = $post_author_obj->first_name . ' ' . $post_author_obj->last_name;

        if( ! has_term( $post_author_name, 'post_tag', $post ) ) {

            wp_set_post_terms( $post_id, $post_author_name, 'post_tag', true );

        }


    }


}