The Yellow Marker

I wanted to remove the “author” tag from my RSS feed from WordPress lately and couldn’t find an appropriate plugin. The reason for this was that I am co-writing for a blog but we don’t want to show individual authors.

When reading a feed in e.g. Google Reader, you either get to see the title, the blog name and the other when in “all items” view or just the title and the author:

All Items View: Blog and Author

Single Blog View: Only Author

The end result I was looking for should only always contain the name of the blog and never of the author:

Any View without an Author

As I said, there may be a plugin that does the job but I haven’t found it (let me know if you did). That said, there is an easy manual way to get rid of the author:

1) Connect to your blog via FTP – You will need to edit a couple of files that are WordPress specific and are unrelated to the theme you are using. So there is no direct way to do this (Again, there might be a plugin that let’s you do exactly this).

2) Download (or edit remotely): feed-atom.php, feed-rdf.php and feed-rss2.php – These three files contain all a call to the PHP function: php_the_author(). They are located in the folder wp-include (WordPress 3.2.1). Remove the bit: < ?php the_author()?> between the “name” tag in feed-atom.php and the “dc:creator” tag in feed-rdf.php and feed-rss2.php respectively.
As an example, the feed-rss2.php file should be changed from:

< ?php the_author() ?>

to:

3) Upload – If you did the change remotely, forget this step. Otherwise, upload the three files again.

Alternatively, you can download these files here and upload them to your server:

rss-feed-without-author

However, remember that the zipped files are WordPress 3.2.1 compatible and might not work with other versions.

UPDATE: The same works with the latest WordPress 3.3 Release. Simply copy paste the three files

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