Feature Me! A plugin for WordPress

Feature Me! is a plugin for WordPress that makes it easy to spotlight a blogger on a site with multiple authors. Simple to use and implement, this plugin will hopefully give your authors a little deserved recognition. Feature Me! is released under GPL so it is free to use in any sort application, and best of all you can monkey with the code to tailor it to your needs.

Download Feature Me! v0.9 for WordPress

Installation

First, download the Feature-Me.zip file and unpack the archive, then upload the feature_me folder to your plugins directory (yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins). From the Plugins Management page in WordPress, activate the plugin and you’re ready to go.

Settings

The settings for the plugin are pretty simple. You first choose how the plugin selects the featured author; it can either pick someone at random or it will select the author who has published the greatest number of posts in the given time frame. Second, you set how often you want the plugin to change the featured author, either daily, weekly or monthly. (If you set the plugin to choose authors at random, you can also have it change each time the page is loaded.)

Using the plugin

To get the featured author text to appear on your site, all you have to do is call the function get_featured_author() from somewhere in your template, as in:

<?php echo get_featured_author(); ?>

By default the function returns the author’s bio (if there is one) and the author’s nickname as a link to the author page. If your particular theme doesn’t use an author template, you may want to remove the link HTML from inside the get_featured_author function. Or you could always build your own author template using the helpful tips from the good folks at WordPress.

Pretty simple, no?

To see an example of Feature Me! in operation, you can check out the site oddsnark.  They have a featured author section at the top of the sidebar. (Thanks to Aaron for asking. )

If you have questions or run into problems, or if you have any other feedback, feel free to drop us a few peanuts in the comments section below.