How to Remove Twenty Fourteen Author Name or Link

This tips is for anyone who uses Twenty Fourteen theme in their websites, to remove the author link in the single post page.

By default, under the post title, you will find, the date, the Twenty Fourteen author link and name which is clickable, and the “leave a comment” post meta links.

For some reasons, you might want to hide or remove this WordPress author link from your theme.

I saw many forum posts, and many suggests, putting display:none; in style.css which I don’t recommend for these two reasons; although it is displayed none or basically hidden, but advanced browser user, can always view the source code from your homepage. And if they do that, they can easily find your author name and link.

Second, although I am not a SEO expert, putting “display:none;” attribute too much will have no good effect in your site’s SEO.

Every theme has different code, so I guess, if you use other theme, and not Twenty Fourteen theme, then this tutorial isn’t for you.

What will we achieve?

1.We will display the author name but will not be clickable or without link.

2. We will remove it completely.

So at this point, it’s up to you which one you want to do, but I will show you both in this tutorial.

What do we need to prepare?

1. Create the child theme first.

2. You will need access to your WP files, either by using FTP client or direct access. For this post, I am using FileZilla.

The Whole Process

Basically, we will need to modify the function twentyfourteen_posted_on() which we can find in content.php.

And this function itself is actually a replacable function, which mean we can replace the function with child theme’s function. (Some functions of a theme will load the child theme functions.php first, and then the parent theme’s, not overrided like stylesheet CSS file.)

This function is found inside the parent theme directory twentyfourteen/inc/template-tags.php line 101.

We copy the twentyfourteen_posted_on() function into our child theme’s functions.php and modify the code to remove the author name and link, or just to remove the link, and still show the author name.

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Steps:

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1. Create or edit functions.php of your child theme.

2. Add this code to completely remove the author name and the link. Do not forget to delete the <?php and ?> PHP block code if you have any content in your child theme’s functions.php. (I added many code in this child theme, you can check out how to remove the left sidebar and center align 2014 theme tutorial).

<?php
if ( ! function_exists( 'twentyfourteen_posted_on' ) ) :
/**
 * Print HTML with meta information for the current post-date/time and author.
 *
 * @since Twenty Fourteen 1.0
 */
function twentyfourteen_posted_on() {
	if ( is_sticky() && is_home() && ! is_paged() ) {
		echo '<span class="featured-post">' . __( 'Sticky', 'twentyfourteen' ) . '</span>';
	}

	// Set up and print post meta information.
	printf( '<span class="entry-date"><a href="%1$s" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="%2$s">%3$s</time></a></span>',
		esc_url( get_permalink() ),
		esc_attr( get_the_date( 'c' ) ),
		esc_html( get_the_date() )
	);
}
endif;
?>

Or Add this code to just remove the link, and make the author link not clickable.

<?php
//Code to remove the author of Twenty Fourteen child
if ( ! function_exists( 'twentyfourteen_posted_on' ) ) :
/**
 * Print HTML with meta information for the current post-date/time and author.
 *
 * @since Twenty Fourteen 1.0
 */
function twentyfourteen_posted_on() {
	if ( is_sticky() && is_home() && ! is_paged() ) {
		echo '<span class="featured-post">' . __( 'Sticky', 'twentyfourteen' ) . '</span>';
	}

	// Set up and print post meta information.
	printf( '<span class="entry-date"><a href="%1$s" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="%2$s">%3$s</time></a></span> <span class="byline"><span class="author vcard">%5$s</span></span>',
		esc_url( get_permalink() ),
		esc_attr( get_the_date( 'c' ) ),
		esc_html( get_the_date() ),
		esc_url( get_author_posts_url( get_the_author_meta( 'ID' ) ) ),
		get_the_author()
	);
}
endif;

?>

3. Save the new functions.php, and update it to your server. And check the changes.

4. (Thanks to Matt – see comment below for spotting the issue). Now, to display the human icon of the author, you can add following code in your style.css of the child theme, and save it.

/*Displaying author human icon*/
span.author.vcard:before{
		content: "\f304";
		-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
		display: inline-block;
		font: normal 16px/1 Genericons;
		text-decoration: inherit;
		vertical-align: text-bottom;
	}

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