DIY WordPress: Moving The Author’s Byline In WordPress Journalist Theme

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

The Journalist theme for WordPress is very popular, for good reason. It’s simple, clean, and to the point. Even Mark Jaquith, a highly highly experienced WordPress developer uses journalist for his WordPress.com blog.

There’s one part of the Journalist design that I don’t particularly like, and that’s having the author’s byline at the bottom of pages and posts. This morning, I set out to fix that. Moving the Journalist theme’s author byline turned out to be fairly easy, and I’ll show you how to do just that below.

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Move the author’s byline

First step: back up everything before doing anything else.

Second, consider where you are going to do this work. I did it right on the server, live, but I’ve been programming long, long time. If you’re not comfortable fixing stuff you break, consider making the changes locally, then uploading the modified files to your host. (You might consider modifying the theme name as well, to keep track of what you have changed.)

In any case, where ever you decide to work, you will need to change 5 files, all in the same way:

• index.php: This is your main website display.
• single.php: When you click on a title link, this is php file that gets served.
• page.php: Default layout for pages.
• archive.php: When you view a category, this file lays it out for you.
• search.php: The results page for a search on your website.

As it turns out, you need to make the same change in each file, except that the code is going to look slightly different in each file. I won’t go into the technical details on why having file layout handled by more than one PHP file is inconvenient. There were likely constraints dictating this approach in the WordPress framework when the theme was written. In any case, it’s no big deal, we can handle it.

What we need to do is find the block of PHP code that displays the author information. Let’s start with index.php. Your file should look very similar, but probably not exactly the same as the screenshot below. I usually tinker a bit with themes to make the format more readable, so there may be slightly different layouts, but all the pieces should be in the same order.

After you move it, you should have something similar to this:

Simple theme changes are easy

Now that you have finished with index.php, you need to make the same kind of change in each of the other 4 files: archive.php, single.php, page.php and search.php.

Journalist is cleanly coded overall, but you will notice that each file has a slightly different code formatting layout, and none of them will look exactly the same as my screenshots. Don’t be rattled. Figure it out using the class names and you will be fine.

You can see the result in the screenshot above. Perfect!

Was this enough? Or is this just too boring? If you feel compelled to spice up your byline even more, you might be interested in “Styling The Author’s Byline In WordPress Journalist Theme In 3 Steps.”