wilkyboy2 on "Custom Wordpress author names"

Hi All,

I am migrating my school's Online Newspaper from Joomla to Wordpress, and I am trying to modify the theme (Twenty Fourteen), so that it uses a metadata key value as the display name for a post (since most of the content creators have had their posts submitted to the old site using an editor as a proxy, so their names are stored as 'author aliases').
It should be as simple as:

if (author_id = 0) {
    $author_name = $meta['alias'];
}

My awesome php simplification
But where should this be implemented within the vast expanse of wordpress code.

I would also greatly appreciate being shown how to configure all of the other author related perks (list author posts, these authors have contributed etc.)

I would show you the site in situ, but unfortunately it is running on my local dev machine. Not that seeing it would help at all.

any help at all would be greatly appreciated!

-- Wilky