Pagination only won't work in author template

Question

I using custom $wp_query for most of my archive pages like, taxonomy,index,category and author page. Everything working fine, except one weird thing - the author template page pagination failed to work. The pagination stop to work on page 2 it direct to the 404 page. Pagination on other archive page, works perfectly.

Here is my codes for author.php template :

<?php get_header(); ?>
<section id="primary">
<div id="content" role="main">

<?php $curauth = (isset($_GET['author_name'])) ? get_user_by('slug', $author_name) : get_userdata(intval($author));
?>

            <?php toolbox_content_nav( 'nav-above' ); ?>


            <?php   
            $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
            $args = array(
            'showposts'=> 2,
            'paged' => $paged,
            'post_type'=> array('cpt1','cpt2'));    

                    $query = new WP_Query( $args );
             ?>
        <?php if ($query ->have_posts() ) : ?>
            <h1>Posts from <?php echo $curauth->first_name; ?> </h1>
              <?php while ( $query->have_posts() ) : $query->the_post(); ?>
                                 <li>
                                  <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent    Link: <?php the_title(); ?>">
                                 <?php the_title(); ?></a>,
                                  <?php the_time('d M Y'); ?> in <?php the_category('&');?>
                                  </li>

            <?php endwhile; ?>

            <?php wp_pagenavi( array( 'query' => $query) );  ?>

        <?php else : ?>

            <article id="post-0" class="post no-results not-found">
                <header class="entry-header">
                    <h1 class="entry-title"><?php _e( 'Nothing Found', 'toolbox' ); ?></h1>
                </header><!-- .entry-header -->

                <div class="entry-content">
                    <p><?php _e( 'It seems we can&rsquo;t find what you&rsquo;re looking for. Perhaps searching can help.', 'toolbox' ); ?></p>
                    <?php get_search_form(); ?>
                </div><!-- .entry-content -->
            </article><!-- #post-0 -->

        <?php endif; ?>

        </div><!-- #content -->
    </section><!-- #primary -->

     <?php get_sidebar(); ?>
     <?php get_footer(); ?>

I am using wp_pagenavi plugin for the pagination anyway. Apparently the wp_pagenavi knows there are pages (because it show more than 1 page at the pagination link), but when i goto page two, turns out no post was found (404 page).

I've googled this issue and applied all the suggestion that I searched, still no help. What is the problem?

Answer 1

You have a couple of issues here, the main one being that your query sets posts per page to two, but the number of pages available has no relationship to your custom query. If your "Blog pages show at most" under Reading settings is set to 10, and an author only has <= 10 posts, there is no second page.

The other issue you will discover is that you're not setting an author argument in your query, so you're not pulling posts from a specific author.

To solve both of these problems and also eliminate the waste of resources in creating secondary queries to replace default queries, you should remove all of this from your templates and instead use the pre_get_posts action in your functions.php. This way, pagination is handled automatically.

function wpa63043_author_pre_get( $query ) {
    if ( $query->is_author() && $query->is_main_query() ) :
        $query->set( 'posts_per_page', 2 );
        $query->set( 'post_type', array('cpt1','cpt2') );
    endif;
}
add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'wpa63043_author_pre_get' );

Answer 2

Try changing your page slug. If I remember correctly, it cannot be the same as custom post type.

@edit: I don't have time to check it right now, but here's what may cause this problem imho:

You have page with url yoursite.com/author. Your site can display single author, named "John" in example using this link: yoursite.com/author/john/. When you try to add navigation, this url is created: yoursite.com/author/page/2. WordPress assumes that word "page" in the example is actually the name of the author, which doesn't exist and thats why uyou get 404 error. If You change your url's to display single author John: yoursite.com/author/john and page with all authors listed to: yoursite.com/authors/ (added s), than you won't have url problems.