For item (1), you can maintain your own app's profiles (author.php
in your case) for your authors. On your own app's profile page (author.php
), you would add a link from that page to Google and specify the rel="me"
attribute on that link. So Alice's profile page might say something like "<a href="https://plus.google.com/xxxxxxxxxxx" rel="me">Find Alice on Google+</a>
.
This indirect authorship linking is supported. You also will need the link from Alice's Google+ profile that lists her as a contributor to your site. Once the linking is setup in both directions, authorship can start to show up. Authorship won't always display in all cases and can take some time for it to start appearing as Google would need to reindex your pages.
For item (2), I don't think the profiles URL will enable authorship. Some people use that URL as a vanity URL, but as far as I know it isn't supported for use with things like authorship, badges, etc.