Author page: Comments and Ratings?

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I have a mult-author site where the author page gets high traffic. People want to know more about them. I have modified the author page to show more info, some custom fields, etc. but what I’d really like to do is turn on Comments for the author.php page (so that OTHER logged in users can leave review-like messages for the Author), and ultimately offer a star-ratings type of effect so that Users can “rate” the author. I have searched for plugins and other functions but it seems like everything is for Posts or Products or something. Any insight is greatly appreciated!

4 s
4

just to add to what Rarst answered, you can create Custom Post Type not to emulate Comments but as stub posts with no ui.

then to every Author on your site add a custom user metadata that will hold a post id of your newly made post type (one per each author) and in your author template before you call the comment loop\form set the global $post to that post id.

something like:

<?php
//save the true post id
$true_id = $post->ID;
// populate $post with the stub post
$author_post_id = get_user_meta($user_id, author_post_id,true);
query_posts("p=$author_post_id");
the_post();

//fool wordpress to think we are on a single post page
$wp_query->is_single = true;
//get comments
comments_template();
//reset wordpress to ture post
$wp_query->is_single = false;
query_posts("p=$true_id");
the_post();
?>

Now going back and updating all of your existing users could be a pain, but for newly create user you can create the stub post type id for user metadata on registration.

and you can use any rating plugin that is based on posts now that you have a post (you custom post type) associated with each author.

Hope this makes sense.
Ohad.

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