Today, I released the first public version of the Co-Authors Plus plug-in for WordPress, which allows multiple authors to be added to Posts and Pages. The plug-in is an extension of the Co-Authors plug-in created by Weston Ruter.
The plug-in is a result of a this conversation, namely how to deal with users as your userbase grows, a genuine problem facing newspapers, magazines, and community sites using WordPress, and a problem I’ve been toying with for a while now while working on website for The Boar.
Currently, WordPress allows only a single author per Post/Page. Weston’s plugin fixed that problem. However, the other design problem it failed to overcome was the usage of drop-downs to assign users to Posts/Pages. Once you scale up to 10+ users, this starts to become unmanageable (and when you start pushing 100+ it really becomes a problem).¬† Granted, the typical blog would not deal with this problem. Granted, the design is only a problem when you dealing with a large number of users, and therefore not something the average blog would worry about.
So, what’s the main difference between Co-Authors and Co-Authors Plus?
The most notable difference is the replacement of the standard WordPress authors drop-downs with search-as-you-type/auto-suggest/whatever-you-call-them input boxes. As a result, major bits of the JavaScript code was changed to be more jQuery-friendly. Eventually, I hope to include the ability to add new Users from within the Edit Post/Page screen, to fix another piece of broken workflow, and possibly Gravatar support.
Find it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/co-authors-plus/
I haven’t tried Co-Authors Plus yet, but the improvements you describe are much needed. Thanks for doing this! Should I be able to switch to your plugin from the original Co-Authors without disrupting anything?
Yep, you should be able to switch over without problems. Let me know how it goes.
Nice work Mo. I can’t wait to install it and get it running. Should solve a lot of our issues with multiple authors.
Is there a reason why I can’t remove the ‘admin’ author from posts (that I posted as admin but don’t want attributed to me)?
Hi Luke,
You can click on the default author (‘admin’) and type in a new author to change it. If that doesn’t work, then it’s likely a bug. If so, email me some more details (browser, OS, etc.) and I’ll take a look.
Thanks,
Mo
Hi !
I use your Plugin, but sometimes it doesn’t work. I don’t get any authors.
I also need an extension to your plugin (i would pay for this).
I have a journalistic blog. So we have one who write the text and some others who shoot the fotos.
Now i want display both. The Text author (the ‘normal’ author of the post) and the additional authors.
I i search for an author, all (text and foto) authors have to be used.
Is this possible ?
regards
ralf
i am using the the_author() tag under the iterate loop.
which returns me to the name of the author.
is there a tag that i could use to get the author’s user id.
I am using buddypress and want the coauthors to be linked to the buddy press member page and not the author post archive-
here is what i have got for now –
count() == 1 ? ‘Author: ‘ : ‘Authors: ‘;
$i->iterate(); ?>
<a href="http://intranet.nfshost.com/members/“>
iterate()){
print $i->is_last() ? ‘ and ‘ : ‘, ‘; ?>
<a href="http://intranet.nfshost.com/members/“>