Users, Authors, and People
User is an easy one, it’s somebody who can log into the website! They have login credentials and a Role, like Subscriber or Administrator. Any User that has the create_post capability can log into the backend and do exactly that.
Author is also a built-in concept; all Posts MUST have an Author, which really just indicates which User “owns” the post. The Post Author is ALWAYS a User. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all Users are Authors! Some Users (like Subscribers) don’t have the create_post capability, and some that do have it (like Admins) don’t always use it.
A Person is a Custom Post Type that we made up so that we could create “Page-Like” posts to represent People. By default, there is NO relationship between a Person Post and anything, they’re just Pages. A Person can NOT be an Author; remember, Authors are always Users.
However (and this is where it starts to get confusing) we add a field to Users so that you can associate a User with a Person. By creating this association, a developer could, for example, look up the User associated with a Person, and then list any posts where that User is the post Author for a “Posts by this Person” block.
Beware! WordPress includes a set of of core blocks made to display information about the Author: Author, Avatar, Author Biography, and Author Name. Like the names imply, these pull their content directly from the Author of “The Current Post”, which is the User, NOT the Person that may be attached to that User. If you need a Block to display information about the Person, ask a Developer for help!
