Peter Raschendorfer

The Smart User Slug Hider Plugin hides usernames in Author Pages URLs to enhance Security
<h3>Retired Plugin</h3>
Development, maintenance and support of this plugin has been retired in october 2023. You can use this plugin as long as is works for you.
There will be no more updates and I won’t answer any support questions. Thanks for your understanding.
Feel free to fork this plugin.
<h3>Usage</h3>
The plugin automatically replaces user names with 16 digits coded strings. There are no settings. Just install and forget. Deactivating the Plugin restores the default WordPress behavior.
<h3>Why use this plugin?</h3>
WordPress uses the pattern <code>example.com/author/name</code> for author page URLs where <code>name</code> represents the users login name.
This means that the login names from all your users are publicly visible which is a serious security flaw.
The Smart User Slug Hider Plugin changes all author page URLs from e.g. <code>example.com/author/john</code> to something like <code>example.com/author/e9e716def73f76ac</code>.
The codes are generated automatically and its impossible to make conclusions about the user names. The WordPress default URLs will cause a 404 (not found) error.
<h3>Shortcodes</h3>
The plugin adds three shortcodes you can use in your posts:
<ul>
<li><code>[smart_user_slug]</code> – the user slug of the post author – e.g. e9e716def73f76ac</li>
<li><code>[smart_user_url]</code> – the url of the post author’s profile page – e.g. example.com/author/e9e716def73f76ac</li>
<li><code>[smart_user_link]</code> – adds a link to the post author’s profile page</li>
</ul>
<h3>Theme Functions</h3>
The plugin adds two functions that can be used in theme files:
<ul>
<li><code>get_smart_user_slug( $author_id )</code> to get the user slug for the author – the parameter $author_id is optional, if omitted the author`s ID of the current post is used</li>
<li><code>the_smart_user_slug( $author_id )</code> to display the user slug for the author – the parameter $author_id is optional, if omitted the author`s ID of the current post is used</li>
</ul>
<h3>Plugin Privacy Information</h3>
<ul>
<li>This plugin does not set cookies</li>
<li>This plugin does not collect or store any data</li>
<li>This plugin does not send any data to external servers</li>
</ul>

Smart User Slug Hider

Hide usernames in Author Pages URLs to enhance Security

fmarzocca

Particularly suitable to all multi-nested categories and multi-authors website, with lots of posts and complex category layout (i.e.: academic papers, newpapers articles, etc), as weel as for single-user websites (read below). This plugin allows the user to place a shortcode into any page and get rid of a long and nested menu/submenu to show all site’s posts (including custom post types assigned to a standard category). A customizable selector in the page will allow the reader to select grouping by Category/Author/Title.
Shortcode’s options include:
<ul>
<li>excluding any category from the list</li>
<li>excluding/including admin users from the list</li>
<li>single-user website usage</li>
<li>select what list(s) to display</li>
<li>limit number of posts in list output </li>
<li>Show (optional) post date</li>
<li>Show in reverse date order</li>
</ul>
Output grouped by Category will look like:
<pre><code>CAT1
 post1 AUTHOR
 SUBCAT1
 post2 AUTHOR
 post3 AUTHOR
 SUBCAT2
 post4 AUTHOR
 ...
 ...
</code></pre>
Shortcode generator
The plugin installs a new menu ACT List Shortcodes in Admin->Tools. The tool is a helper to automatically generate the required shortcode. It will parse the options and display the string to be copied and pasted into any page. Please refer to the plugin admin page for a full list of options.
Default manual usage:
[ACT-list]
all categories and subcategories post, excluding administrator’s posts, grouped by (upon selection) Category/Author/Title
Exclude categories:
[ACT-list exclude=”cat1-slug, cat2-slug, …”]
listed categories will be excluded. Categories must be listed with their slugnames.
Include admin’s posts:
[ACT-list admin=1]
this option will also include all admin’s posts in the list.
Single-user website:
[ACT-list singleuser=1]
this option is suited for websites with a single author (or when you don’t want to show the authors). It removes grouping by Authors and any author name. This option includes the admin=1 option, so that it will list any post in the website. You can still apply “excluding categories” option.
Select what list(s) to display
The parameter “show” will allow the admin to select what lists will be shown and if the dropdown selector is needed or not. i.e.:
[ACT-list show=”Category, Author”]
or
[ACT-list show=”Title, Category”]
Allowed terms for the “show” parameter are: Author, Title, Category.
Split the lists into separate pages
By selecting only one variable in the “show” parameter, you will be able to show only one list without the dropdown selector. This will enable you to put the 3 lists into separate pages, or separate tabs of the same page.
Page#1 (or tab#1) 
[ACT-list show=”Category”]
Page#2 (or tab#2) 
[ACT-list show=”Author”]
Page#3 (or tab#3) 
[ACT-list show=”Title”]
Limit the number of posts in the lists
If you have a large numbers of posts (>2,000), it could be convenient to limit the number of posts in the lists, including only a certain amount of the most recent posts. This can be achieved separately for the 3 lists using the following parameters: postspercategory, postsperauthor, totalpoststitle. i.e.:
[ACT-list show=”Category” postspercategory=”20″] will show only the 20 most recent posts for each category.
Show posts list in reverse date order
By default, the posts will be listed from newest to oldest. To change this behaviour, use the reverse-date=1 parameter.
Show posts date (v.>=2.7.0)
The date of the post could be printed out before the post name, optionally
<blockquote>
If you like the plugin, feel free to rate it (on the right side of this page) or <a href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=4EH3N5XZJZCRQ" rel="nofollow ugc">donate via PayPal</a>. Thanks a lot! 🙂
</blockquote>

List all posts by Authors, nested Categories and Titles

This plugin lists all posts by Author, nested Categories and Title, allowing to place the lists in any page.

Smart User Slug Hider vs List all posts by Authors, nested Categories and Titles