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Edit Author Slug

This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Edit Author Slug

By Brandon Allen
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Description

This plugin allows full control of your user permalinks, allowing you to change both the author base (the ‘/author/’ portion of the author URLs), and the author slug (defaults to the username of the author). You can set the author base globally, or you can set it to be user-specific based on a user’s role. You now have the power to craft the perfect URL structure for you Author pages.

WordPress default structure http://example.com/author/username/.

Edit Author Slug allows for http://example.com/ninja/master-ninja/.

Using a role-based author base would allow for http://example.com/ida/master-splinter/ (for an Administrator Role), or http://example.com/koga/leonardo/ (for a Subscriber Role).

Development of this plugin takes place on GitHub. Pull requests are always welcome!

Translations should be submitted to Translate WordPress.

Screenshots

Settings
Settings
Individual user author slug
Individual user author slug

Installation

  1. Upload edit-author-slug folder to your WordPress plugins directory (typically ‘wp-content/plugins’)
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
  3. Go to Users > Your Profile, or Users > All Users > (username), and edit the author slug.
  4. Click “Update Profile” or “Update User”
  5. Go to Settings > Edit Author Slug to edit settings
  6. Click “Save Changes”

FAQ

What is an author slug?

On standard WordPress installs, it’s the final part of an author permalink.
e.g. – https://example.com/author/author-slug/

In relation to WordPress internals, the author slug is the same as the user_nicename field found in a WP_User object, or the users table in the database.

Will my changes persist if I deactivate or delete the Edit Author Slug plugin?

It depends.

Changing a user’s author slug is permanent, as this changes the user’s user_nicename field in the database.

If you’ve changed the author base, deactivating or deleting the plugin will revert your author base back to author.

Why can’t I edit my Author Slug?

Make sure you are an admin, or have been assigned the edit_users capability.

Why isn’t my new Author Slug working?

While I’ve made every attempt to prevent this, I may have missed a spot or two. First things first, go to Settings > Permalinks and click “Save Changes.” You don’t need to actually need to make any changes for this to work. Hopefully, this should kick your new Author Slug into gear.

If this doesn’t work, make sure you don’t have any slug conflicts from other posts/pages/plugins/permalink setting/etc. If you’re still experiencing the issue, feel free to post a support request in the forums.

Reviews

Thank you!

June 8, 2025
Finally a way to hide my admin username from across the site, I love this plugin!
Read all 84 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Edit Author Slug” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“Edit Author Slug” has been translated into 13 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “Edit Author Slug” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

1.9.2

  • Release date: 2025-05-27
  • Bumps “Tested up to” version to 6.8
  • Fixes issue where load_plugin_textdomain was called too early.
  • Update dependency package versions

1.9.1

  • Release date: 2024-10-14
  • Bumps “Tested up to” version to 6.6
  • Bumps minimum required PHP version to 7.4
  • Bumps minimum required WP version to 5.8
  • Update dependency package versions

1.9.0

  • Release date: 2023-10-17
  • Bumps “Tested up to” version to 6.4
  • Bumps minimum required PHP version to 7.0
  • Bumps minimum required WP version to 5.5
  • Update dependency package versions

1.8.4

  • Release date: 2022-02-13
  • Bumps “Tested up to” version to 5.9

1.8.3

  • Release date: 2021-08-07
  • Bumps “Tested up to” version to 5.8
  • Improves string translations and adds some missing strings that couldn’t, previously be translated. Props @alexclassroom

1.8.2

  • Release date: 2021-06-01
  • Bumps “Tested up to” version to 5.7

1.8.1

  • Release date: 2020-12-14
  • Corrects settings page notice link to actually link to the current user’s profile page.

1.8.0

  • Release date: 2020-12-14
  • Bumps “Tested up to” version to 5.6
  • Adds a notice to the settings page reminding you that you can edit your author slug on your profile page.