Why did Twenty Twelve stop showing bylines?

  • Unknown's avatar
    danielgreene · Member ·

    Hi. I sent an email directly to (email visible only to moderators and staff) but haven’t heard back, so I’m pasting it here:

    When Twenty Twelve came out last week (or two weeks ago), it showed author bylines on the front page and post pages. I used it for this reason. Sometime after 11 PM on September 8, it stopped showing bylines on the multi-post and single post pages.

    I searched the Forums for something about this problem and found that someone else experienced the same thing I did.

    One member, timethief, responded to this person with the same answer s/he keeps posting in different forums, and I don’t see how it’s true. S/he writes:

    Regardless of the theme, bylines will only display now if there are at least two authors who both have at least one published post in the blog. http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/theme-improvements/
    For a single author byline workaround, and for a link to a list of themes that do display author profiles see here > http://onecoolsitebloggingtips.com/2012/01/03/wordpress-com-changes-bylines-for-authors/

    Now, I’ve read the WordPress blog post, “Theme Improvements,” several times, and I see nothing that says anything like what timethief is saying. The word ‘author’ appears only twice on the page where it says, “better author highlighting for multiple author blogs.” The word ‘byline’ is nowhere to be found on the page, including comments. It bothers me that someone is repeatedly posting the same thing that’s not true, and no one corrects this error. This statement comes up in several Google search results as well, and it’s misleading.

    Another thing that bothers me is to see the forum post “Twenty Twelve Byline” labeled “resolved.” Who labeled it ‘resolved’? It’s not resolved.

    As of now, the theme doesn’t even show a byline on the single post page. It doesn’t even show the “About author” info.

    Bylines are important, especially since Google started verifying authorship and displaying authorship in search results. I request/suggest: 1) Change WordPress.com so that all themes show author bylines on both main pages and single post pages. It won’t hurt. You could give bloggers the option to turn them off if they really want to. 2) If you won’t enable bylines for every blog regardless of theme, please add “bylines” to your theme search filters. I have spent hours searching for themes that show bylines — actually, themes that have post formats and show bylines, which is even harder to find. You could save someone like me a lot of time by just letting us filter theme searches for bylines.

    Please let me know if there’s anything you can do to help–

    Daniel
    Blog url: http://messagesandmeans.wordpress.com/

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    Hello there,
    I flagged this thread for a Staff response.

  • Unknown's avatar
    danielgreene · Member ·

    Thanks, timethief. I got a response from staff explaining that, because of feedback from the WordPress community, they started using CSS (the style markup that composes the themes) to hide the author byline on some, but not all, themes. This makes the byline invisible in the normal, theme/CSS-enabled view, but if you view the page without the theme/CSS you will see the bylines. This means the search engines can read the bylines and verify authorship. I checked this with Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool and found the search engine did, in fact, read my byline and verify my authorship. This is good to know!

    For anyone who knows HTML and CSS and is curious, here is the code that does this trick:

    <span class="by-author"> by <span class="author vcard">Daniel Greene</span></span>

    I do appreciate the time you spend volunteering for WordPress Support Forums, timethief. I just get very frustrated when a question that perplexes me is not answered accurately. The fact is there are quite a few themes that still show bylines for single author blogs, and for me the answer is not creating a second user to make one post on each of my six blogs. I hope my sharing the answer I got from Support staff helps you and others who have the same question.

    I blogged about this (not including our discussion) here: WordPress themes not showing author bylines explained

  • Unknown's avatar
    danielgreene · Member ·

    Hm… even the [code] element is not making the CSS visible. Oh well, there are still ways to view source code.

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