Molongui Authorship allows you to change post’s authorship to a guest author —that is an author that has not a user account in your site. Check out this article on Guest Authors to know more about that feature.
Usually, guest posts are handled by the site’s admin or head editor. They add the post to WordPress using their own account and then easily switch post authorship using the provided control.
But what if one of your guest posts get a comment? How to reply those comments as if it was the guest author?
Easy. To reply a comment as a guest author, you have two options:
- Logged in into your site’s Dashboard, from the Comments page
- Logged out, from the post itself using the Respond form at the bottom.
Responding from the Dashboard
When responding a comment from the Dashboard, you only need to input your reply. Your name, email address and, optionally, your website URL are taken automatically from your profile.
But once you have responded, you can go and edit your reply. So you can change that name, email address and, optionally, website URL to anything you want. You just need to replace your data with that one from the guest author. Providing the same email address as the guest author has configured in his/her profile will make that guest author’s avatar to be displayed.
Responding from the Frontend
The native WordPress commenting system is relatively basic, admittedly, but it still does the job. The biggest advantage of the native WordPress commenting system is its front-end usability. To leave a comment, visitors need only leave their name and email address, and, optionally, their website URL.
So in this case, you just need to fill in those fields with the guest author information. It is important to make sure that the provided email address matches the one that guest author has in his/her profile. This way his avatar will be displayed alongside the comment.
Letting the guest author reply to the comments
Not having a user account, guest authors cannot log in to your site’s Dashboard and reply a comment to their posts. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have the ability to reply. Just let them know how to respond to comments using the front-end form. And point out the fact that they must provide the same email address you set in their profile.
