GhostLabs Undercard

Undercard renders author and profile cards as real Gutenberg blocks. Not a box injected into
your content: blocks you place where you want them, including in template parts and Query Loops,
where each card draws the author of the row it sits in.

Every card is a projection of one author record. Change a job title once and every card showing
that person changes with it.

Four card families, none of them paywalled

Design quality is not the upgrade. All four families and every layout ship in this plugin.

• Meridian — a typographic business card. Vertical, horizontal, row, chip.
• Cobalt — built around a duotone portrait, with an accent color and adjustable framing.
• Aurora — effects-led: frosted panel, gradient accents, a stat strip. Adds a mini layout.
• NFC Profile — a digital business card with a contact download, a profile QR code and
  the Web Share API.

Each has light, dark and system schemes where the design allows one, and every card is
container-query driven, so it adapts to the space it is given rather than to the viewport.

Authors, not just accounts

• Guest authors — credit somebody with no WordPress account. They get a real profile URL.
• Co-authors — as many as a post needs, in the order you choose.
• Roles — author, co-author, editor, reviewer, fact-checker.
• Bylines — assigned in the post sidebar, and the theme’s own byline can follow them.

These are free. Several plugins charge for them; a free tier that could not credit two people
on one post would not be worth installing.

Author identity fields

Job title, employer, education, areas of expertise, contact details and social links, editable
on the user profile screen and on each guest. Cards display what an author filled in and omit
what they did not — an empty row looks broken, a missing one looks designed.

Contact download

Cards can offer a .vcf contact file. It is gated on what the author deliberately published,
not on a setting somebody else controls: an author with no contact details published serves no
file at all, and any author can opt out entirely.

Undercard Pro

Everything above is free and stays free. Pro adds the machine-readable half:

• JSON-LD structured data — a connected @graph emitting a Person node per author and an
  Article node that references them by @id, so the article points to each credited person’s
  full Person node, with the credentials they filled in, rather than carrying only a name.
• Credentials as structured data — jobTitle, worksFor, alumniOf and knowsAbout. The
  fields are free to fill in and free to display; publishing them to a machine is what Pro adds.
• Yoast and Rank Math integration — enriching the graph those plugins already emit, rather
  than competing with it.
• Author profile pages — replacing the theme’s author archive with a composed profile.

This plugin shows you exactly what you would publish before you buy anything. Look for
Structured data preview on any user profile screen: it renders the Person node your site
would emit and marks the four properties an upgrade unlocks.

External services

This plugin contacts one external service, and not when you install or activate it.

Gravatar (Automattic). When a card needs an avatar and the author has not uploaded a photo,
the plugin asks Gravatar whether one exists for that account before falling back to initials.
WordPress itself cannot answer this — it returns an avatar URL for any address, and Gravatar
serves a generated placeholder behind it, so every author would appear to have a photo.

• What is sent: a request to the avatar URL WordPress itself generates, which contains a
  hash of the user’s email address. No new data is created or transmitted by this plugin; it is
  the same URL core already uses to display avatars.
• When: only while WordPress’s own “Show Avatars” setting is on, only for users with an
  account, and the answer is cached for up to a week, so this is rare.
• Where the image comes from: if a Gravatar exists, the visitor’s browser loads it from
  Gravatar, exactly as core avatars do anywhere else on the site.

Turning off Settings → Discussion → Show Avatars stops both entirely, and an author who
uploads a photo is never looked up at all.

Gravatar terms: https://automattic.com/terms/ — privacy: https://automattic.com/privacy/

Links to GhostLabs — not a service. The plugin links to two GhostLabs sites from wp-admin and
the block editor. It never contacts either one: nothing is requested from them in the background,
and the plugin sends them nothing.

• https://theghostlab.io — Undercard Pro’s product page (/undercard) and this plugin’s
  documentation (/docs/undercard). A link to the product page names the screen it was clicked
  on (for example ?from=settings), and carries nothing else.
• https://enter.theghostlab.io/account — your GhostLabs account, where Undercard Pro is
  downloaded after you buy it. It is linked from Settings → Undercard → Undercard Pro, under
  Have a license?, and opens in a new tab.

Following either link is an ordinary visit to that site in your browser.

GhostLabs terms: https://theghostlab.io/terms-of-service — privacy: https://theghostlab.io/privacy-policy

Nothing else is requested from anywhere. Fonts are bundled with the plugin and served from your
own site; nothing is loaded from a CDN.

Source code

The complete, unminified source of this plugin — including the block sources the compiled assets
are built from — is published at:

https://github.com/theghostlab/wp-ghostlabs-undercard

The repository’s committed build/ directory is the readable build, and pnpm install
--frozen-lockfile && GHOSTLABS_MINIFY=0 pnpm run build reproduces it byte for byte. Released
versions of the plugin ship the same sources built minified, which pnpm install
--frozen-lockfile && pnpm run build reproduces byte for byte.