Dynamic social media

Hi there,

Dynamic author image is straightforward — you can add an Image block and set Author Avatar URL as a dynamic tag.

Dynamic social media links are a bit more involved since WordPress doesn’t store social media URLs for users by default. The simplest approach without a dedicated plugin would be to add custom contact fields to user profiles with a small snippet in your child theme’s functions.php or a Code Snippets plugin:

add_filter( 'user_contactmethods', function( $methods ) {
    $methods['linkedin']  = 'LinkedIn URL';
    $methods['instagram'] = 'Instagram URL';
    $methods['facebook']  = 'Facebook URL';
    return $methods;
} );

Each author can then fill in their relevant URLs under Users > Profile.

From there, you can use GenerateBlocks Pro to build your social links:

1. Add an Icon or Button block for each platform.
2. Set the link dynamically using an Author Meta dynamic tag and enter the meta key (e.g. linkedin). Make sure the Required to render checkbox is checked!

That way, only the relevant social icons will display per author.

Hello,

However, for the Author Archive page, I want to display much more detailed information (a longer biography).

Is there a way to target specific authors with different content, or a way to pull a different “long bio” field dynamically for the archive page?

You could use a plugin like ACF to create a field group with a location rule of User Role -> is equal to All that contains a long_bio textarea ACF field, that would be the long bio. You could reference that in the loop template as an author meta dynamic tag with the long_bio meta key name.

Hello,

Yes, depended on how many authors you have, you could have a separate block for each author and display that with GenerateBlocks Display conditions without using a custom field.

Hello,

You will set the conditions just for the author text you want to display not for the whole author box. You will insert as many text blocks as authors. Then, you will show/hide those with conditions. That would be the simplest solution for a limited amount of authors.