Installing the Co-Authors Plus Wordpress Plugin

Installing the plugin

Just browse for it, install it, and enable it! Note that Co-Authors Plus has replaced all previous versions of the co-authors plugins. Its official page is here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/co-authors-plus/

Adding the code to template_tags.php

See some instructions here: https://vip.wordpress.com/documentation/incorporate-co-authors-plus-template-tags-into-your-theme/

As we use a variant of the Accesspress-lite theme, we'll need to do some custom coding to make this work.

First, to put the blog into debug mode so we can see errors uncomment the following in wp-config.php

error_reporting(E_ALL); ini_set('display_errors', 1);
define( 'WP_DEBUG', true);

Then replace the old code with the replacement code in template_tags.php as follows:

Old code from template_tags.php

 if ( ! function_exists( 'accesspresslite_posted_on' ) ) :
 /**
  * Prints HTML with meta information for the current post-date/time and author.
  */
 function accesspresslite_posted_on() {
         $time_string = '<time class="entry-date published" datetime="%1$s">%2$s</time>';
         if ( get_the_time( 'U' ) !== get_the_modified_time( 'U' ) ) {
                 $time_string .= '<time class="updated" datetime="%3$s">%4$s</time>';
         }
 
         $time_string = sprintf( $time_string,
                 esc_attr( get_the_date( 'c' ) ),
                 esc_html( get_the_date() ),
                 esc_attr( get_the_modified_date( 'c' ) ),
                 esc_html( get_the_modified_date() )
         );
 
         printf( __( '<span class="posted-on">Posted on %1$s</span><span class="byline"> by %2$s</span>', 'accesspresslite' ),
                 sprintf( '<a href="%1$s" rel="bookmark">%2$s</a>',
                         esc_url( get_permalink() ),
                         $time_string
                 ),
                 sprintf( '<span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="%1$s">%2$s</a></span>',
                         esc_url( get_author_posts_url( get_the_author_meta( 'ID' ) ) ),
                         esc_html( get_the_author() )
                 )
         );
 }
 endif;
 

Replacement code for template_tags.php

 if ( ! function_exists( 'accesspresslite_posted_on' ) ) :
 /**
  * Prints HTML with meta information for the current post-date/time and author.
  */
 function accesspresslite_posted_on() {
         $time_string = '<time class="entry-date published" datetime="%1$s">%2$s</time>';
         if ( get_the_time( 'U' ) !== get_the_modified_time( 'U' ) ) {
                 $time_string .= '<time class="updated" datetime="%3$s">%4$s</time>';
         }
 
         $time_string = sprintf( $time_string,
                 esc_attr( get_the_date( 'c' ) ),
                 esc_html( get_the_date() ),
                 esc_attr( get_the_modified_date( 'c' ) ),
                 esc_html( get_the_modified_date() )
         );
 
         if ( function_exists( 'coauthors_posts_links' ) ) :
  		printf( __( '<span class="posted-on">Posted on %1$s</span>', 'accesspresslite' ),
 			sprintf( '<a href="%1$s" rel="bookmark">%2$s</a>',
 				esc_url( get_permalink() ),
 				$time_string
 			)
 		);
 		coauthors_posts_links (null,null,'<span class="byline"> by ','</span>');
         else:
 		printf( __( '<span class="posted-on">Posted on %1$s</span><span class="byline"> by %2$s</span>', 'accesspresslite' ),
 			sprintf( '<a href="%1$s" rel="bookmark">%2$s</a>',
 				esc_url( get_permalink() ),
 				$time_string
 			),
 			sprintf( '<span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="%1$s">%2$s</a></span>',
 				esc_url( get_author_posts_url( get_the_author_meta( 'ID' ) ) ),
 				esc_html( get_the_author() )
 			)
 		);
 	endif;
 }
 endif;