Non-user Authors, Custom Post Types

  • dale386

    (@dale386)


    15 years, 9 months ago

    I am setting up WordPress site for a college print magazine. We plan to digitize and post our archives of about 250 issues while continuing to post articles from new issues online. As such, it would be inappropriate to create a user account for our authors. All articles would be uploaded by our editor.

    I would like articles on this site to be able to have multiple authors, but without those authors being user accounts. Further, each author should have an archive page that would list their bio and articles that they have written.

    I think that this may be done some combination of custom fields and WordPress 3’s custom post types, but I do not know how to get started. Specifically, I’m unsure of to how to link an article post type to an author post type and I am not sure of how to have an author page display a list of articles written by that author.

    Similar things can be done in Drupal with various plugins, but WordPress is SO much more user friendly.

    I have seen solutions in WP with the “Co-authors Plus” plugin, but this still leaves me with actual user accounts for each author.

    Any ideas?

    Thanks!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • NOKYARD

    (@nokyard)

    15 years, 8 months ago

    I had a similar situation with my site.

    What i ended up doing is turning ‘Anyone can register’ off in Settings/General. Then creating an Author account for each Author using a dummy email for each. The process took less than 2 hours with 130 Authors by copy ‘n pasting their information from a spreadsheet. (I also disabled the ‘Send this password to the new user by email.’ on the Add New User page.)

    Then, defined different levels of Authors with with the User Role Editor plugin. Silver Author accounts are controlled by the site’s admins, and Gold Author accounts are controlled by the Author.

    The Gold Author accounts are allowed to create new articles, but are not allowed to publish them. That function is reserved for the site’s admins alone. The article shows as a Draft which must then be published by an admin.

    This allows you to utilize every Author function and Plugin available (the SP Authors plugin allows multiple Authors on a single post), while maintaining control of all Authors. If, at a point in the future, one of your Authors joins your staff all you have to do is promote them to Gold Author status with a single mouse click.

    This was done entirely with plugins and no additional programming was required.

    NOKYARD

    (@nokyard)

    15 years, 8 months ago

    Note:

    “creating an Author account for each Author using a dummy email for each”

    You may use dummy email accounts (dummy77@superhappymail.cob), but each dummy email account must be unique.

    NOKYARD

    (@nokyard)

    15 years, 8 months ago

    Sorry, I forgot to mention this.

    With the User Role Editor plugin make sure the Editor role has the ‘edit_others_posts’ capability enabled. When this is selected all Author’s names, including yours, displays as a dropdown list in the Add/Edit Posts area (it ignores subscribers).

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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