Authors & Team Members

Create author profiles with bios, social links, and avatars. Attribute posts to authors and optionally publish dedicated author pages.

Create author profiles to attribute content (like blog posts and publications) to specific people. Authors can have bios, social links, avatars, and optionally their own dedicated profile pages.

Visual Editor (Recommended)

Use Ownable CMS

The easiest way to manage authors is with Ownable CMS—our VS Code extension. Add, edit, and remove authors visually without touching YAML files.

Install Ownable CMS →

🎬 Video: Managing authors with Ownable CMS (coming soon)

Manual Setup

File Structure

Authors are stored as YAML files with matching avatar images:

jane-doe.yaml # Author profile (slug = jane-doe)

john-smith.yaml

jane-doe.jpg # Avatar (same filename as profile)

john-smith.png

The slug (filename without extension) must be lowercase with hyphens instead of spaces. This slug is used to reference the author in content front matter.

Creating an Author

Create the profile file

Create data/authors/<slug>.yaml:

# data/authors/jane-doe.yaml

# Display name
title: Dr. Jane Doe

# Role/position
role: Associate Professor

# Short bio (supports Markdown)
bio: |
  Researcher in machine learning and computational biology.
  Previously at MIT and Google Brain.

# Organization(s)
organizations:
  - name: Stanford University
    url: https://stanford.edu

# Social/contact links
social:
  - icon: envelope
    link: mailto:[email protected]
  - icon: brands/github
    link: https://github.com/janedoe
  - icon: brands/twitter
    link: https://twitter.com/janedoe
  - icon: academicons/google-scholar
    link: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=...
  - icon: brands/linkedin
    link: https://linkedin.com/in/janedoe

# Education (optional)
education:
  - course: PhD in Computer Science
    institution: MIT
    year: 2018
  - course: BSc in Mathematics
    institution: UC Berkeley
    year: 2013

# Interests (optional)
interests:
  - Machine Learning
  - Computational Biology
  - Open Science

Add an avatar image

Upload a photo to assets/media/authors/<slug>.jpg (or .png).

The filename must match the profile slug exactly.

Reference in content

Use the slug in your content's front matter:

---
title: My Research Paper
authors:
  - jane-doe    # References data/authors/jane-doe.yaml
  - john-smith
---

Use the pack/icon-name syntax for social links. See the Icon Reference for all available packs.

social:
  - icon: envelope              # Hero icon (default pack)
    link: mailto:...
  - icon: brands/github         # Brand icons
    link: https://github.com/...
  - icon: academicons/orcid     # Academic icons
    link: https://orcid.org/...

Publishing Author Pages

By default, each author gets their own profile page at /authors/<slug>/. You can control this behavior:

For personal sites where you don't need separate author pages (e.g., the homepage is already your profile), create this file:

# content/authors/_index.md
---
# Unpublish author profile pages
build:
  render: never
cascade:
  build:
    render: never
    list: always
---

Authors will still work for attribution—they just won't have dedicated pages.

To publish author profile pages (e.g., for team or lab sites), simply delete the content/authors/_index.md file if it exists.

Each author will get a page at /authors/<slug>/ showing their bio, social links, and authored content.

Multilingual Authors

For multilingual sites, you can translate author profiles so that names, bios, and roles appear in the reader's language.

How It Works

Place translated author files in language-specific subdirectories under data/. Only include the fields you want to translate — everything else is inherited from the default profile.

jane-doe.yaml # Default profile (all fields)

jane-doe.yaml # French overrides (translated fields only)

jane-doe.yaml # Chinese overrides

Example Translation

The French override file only needs the translatable fields:

# data/fr/authors/jane-doe.yaml

title: Dr. Jane Doe
role: Professeure associée
bio: |
  Chercheuse en apprentissage automatique et biologie computationnelle.
  Précédemment au MIT et Google Brain.

Non-translated fields like social, education, interests, and avatar are automatically inherited from the default data/authors/jane-doe.yaml.

The name submap is deep-merged, so you can translate individual name fields (e.g., name.display) without losing the others.

Quick Reference

Field	Type	Description
`title`	`string`	Display name (required)
`role`	`string`	Job title or role
`bio`	`string`	Short biography (Markdown supported)
`organizations`	`list`	Affiliations with `name` and `url`
`social`	`list`	Social links with `icon` and `link`
`education`	`list`	Degrees with `course`, `institution`, `year`
`interests`	`list`	Research interests or skills

For team sites, consider creating an /authors/ listing page to showcase all team members.