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I have made a custom post type and need to be able to create posts and assign them to authors. It is easy to do this with posts as you can go to the bulk edit screen and immediately change the author. However, when I try to do this with my custom post type the author box is not there. How do I add the functionality to change the author of my custom post type?

EDIT: I found a solution, see answer below.

1
  • which one, you should tick answer which helped
    – Amit Kosti
    Aug 4, 2012 at 23:57

3 Answers 3

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in Custom Post Type register arguments array use this

'supports' => array('title', 'editor', 'thumbnail', 'comments', 'author'),

This will activate author box on the edit screen. After registering author to cpt you need to activate author from edit screen option ( top of the edit screen where you can enable/disable all metabox ) to display authorbox on the edit screen.

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  • For some reason adding 'author' doesn't change anything in my CPT edit page. And it has something to do with the capabilities of the CTP.
    – Floris
    Jul 27, 2021 at 13:15
  • @Floris Well, that is a different scenario. In that case, you may have to set capabilities for the author or role for the CPT. Jul 28, 2021 at 6:48
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I found out that the edit author attribute is not added by default in for custom post types. To add the author attribute the following code is required:

function allowAuthorEditing()
{
  add_post_type_support( 'mytype', 'author' );
}

add_action('init','allowAuthorEditing');
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  • 5
    Why don't you just add this when you register your custom post type. Jul 23, 2012 at 3:31
  • 1
    @BrianFegter - Ideally, it's best to add it when the post type is first registered. However, this approach allows you to add author support to custom post types that you don't have full control over, such as third-party plugins. Oct 27, 2022 at 17:13
2

Go to Screen Options in the top right corner and check the box that says Author. It will then display the Author meta box. This is possibly the worst user experience in WordPress. It confuses so many people.

3
  • @fdsa What does that mean? Jul 23, 2012 at 3:30
  • Referring to answer below, expected 'author' attribute to be by default.
    – fdsa
    Jul 23, 2012 at 4:33
  • 1
    @fdsa Gotcha! You can add that to the capabilities array. Jul 23, 2012 at 4:55

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