Remove author archive

Question

I'm using wordpress as a CMS. Various users on the staff write posts that get incorporated into pages manually.

As far as the outside world is concerned, this is just a bunch of static pages. I want to remove all concept of Authorship, Categories, etc. It's come to my attention that I can browse to domain.com/author/userName and see the author archive.

How do I disable this? I would like it to return a 404.

Answer 1

I would filter template_redirect, with an is_author() conditional, e.g.:

function theme_slug_redirect_author_archive() {
    if ( is_author() ) {
        // Put your redirect code here;
        // Redirect to home_url(), or 
        // return a 404, or whatever
    }
}
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'theme_slug_redirect_author_archive' );