Author Specific URL's in WordPress

Question

In continuation of this thread Mapping multiple URLs to same page in WordPress

is there any other way except redirect similar pattern URLs to same page. Our goal is to provide our guest and other authors there name/email specific URLs so that they can put those links on there website/blogs to encourange there readers to read there guest posts on our platform.

i can easily make sure that for each author who do not have a user profile in our system or don't want to create profile with us should have a unique username which we can associate with his/her posts

e.g if guest author have unique username is uniqu-author URL should be

www.mysite.com/author/uniqueauthor

now he can place this URL on his/her blog/website and when user came to our system we can redirect reader to a common author page and can extract uniqueauthor from URL,issue a query based on this username and come up with all his/her posts.

Any inputs will be much helpful for me to move forward

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

here you go:

add_action('init', 'wp_new_flush_rewrite_rules'); //Run this action only ONCE if not you are looking at 2 extra db queries on every page load so dont forget to comment it out
function wp_new_flush_rewrite_rules() {
    global $wp_rewrite; 
    $wp_rewrite->flush_rules();
}

add_action('generate_rewrite_rules', 'new_rewrite_rules');
function new_rewrite_rules( $wp_rewrite ) {

    $post_type = 'post';

    $new_rules = array(

        'writer/(.+?)/page/?([0-9]{1,})/?$' => 'index.php?post_type='.$post_type.'&meta_key=writer&meta_value='.$wp_rewrite->preg_index(1).'&paged='.$wp_rewrite->preg_index(2),
        'writer/(.+?)/?$' => 'index.php?post_type='.$post_type.'&meta_key=writer&meta_value='.$wp_rewrite->preg_index(1),

    );

    $wp_rewrite->rules = $new_rules + $wp_rewrite->rules;   
    return $wp_rewrite;

}

add_filter('query_vars', 'add_query_vars');
function add_query_vars( $vars ){
    $vars[] = 'meta_key';
    $vars[] = 'meta_value';
    return $vars;
}

add_action('template_redirect', 'template_redirect_intercept');
function template_redirect_intercept(){

    global $wp_query;

    if ( $wp_query->get('writer') && file_exists( TEMPLATEPATH . '/author.php' ) ){
        $wp_query->is_404 = ''; $wp_query->is_archive = 1; $wp_query->is_post_type_archive = 1; // This is to prevent 404 errors on page 2,3,4 if posts for that page dont exist.
        include( TEMPLATEPATH . '/author.php' );
        exit;
    }

}

it is written to search for the 'writer' meta value of a post and display the author.php template.

the url will look like mysite.com/writer/WRITERNAME/ pagination also works so mysite.com/writer/WRITERNAME/page/2/ will work without an issue.