Story’s Author Profiles

Story supports author profiles, so you can highlight your bio. It’s possible to set this globally for the entire site, or individually for each piece of content. Or you can set a global default and override it on individual pieces of content. Scroll to the bottom of any page on this site to see how author profiles are styled.

Story’s author profile system is a slightly simplified (incomplete) implementation of the ideas laid out in Netlify’s how-to document. It allows only one author per piece of content, and doesn’t require Hugo to create the authors taxonomy. Because it’s incomplete, it’s a) missing a few of the features Netlify describes, and b) easier to set up.

Global And Per-Content Authors

If you want to specify an author in the front matter of each post, it’s simply specified like this (YAML example):

---
author: "Elvis Presley"
---

If you want to set a global author parameter for the entire site, which will serve as the default in case any pieces of content don’t specify their own, use your config file’s params array:

params:
   author: "Baron Schwartz"

That’s exactly what this sample site you’re reading right now does: Baron is the author by default, but Elvis is the author of this content you’re reading now.

Creating Author Profiles

To create author profiles, you need to create the author hierarchy under content, and a slugified directory for each author. Then, place an _index.md file into each of those directories, and give it the content needed to describe the author.

For example:

└── content/
    └── authors/
        ├── elvis-presley/
        │   └── _index.md
        ├── aretha-franklin/
        │   └── _index.md
        └── stevie-wonder/
            └── _index.md

You can put any content you want in the file, but Story has CSS to nicely format a square image followed by a paragraph of text. This page you’re viewing right now has “Elvis Presley” as its author, and the content of content/authors/elvis-presley/_index.md is:

---
---
![Elvis](/img/elvis.jpg)

Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) was an American singer
and actor. Regarded as one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th
century, he is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the
King".

Global Fallback Content

Even if you don’t have an author directory and a specific author’s file as described above, you can create content that will serve as a fallback across the whole site. If Story doesn’t find a specific author’s profile page, it’ll look for the default _index.md content for the section it’s currently rendering. The top-level default for the whole site is content/_index.md, which this demo site uses to provide Baron Schwartz’s author information. This information will appear on all pages other than the current page, which is authored by Elvis Presley. This fallback information from content/_index.md looks like the following:

[![Baron Schwartz](/img/baron-square.jpg)](https://www.xaprb.com)

Baron Schwartz is the founder and CTO of [VividCortex](https://vividcortex.com), author of
several books, and creator of various open-source software. He writes about topics
such as technology, entrepreneurship, and fitness. [More about
Baron](https://www.xaprb.com/).

This content is a (non-author-specific) fallback for the entire site. You can see it on all the other pages of this site.