I need a CMS that supports multiple-authors-per-post

October 24, 2007 1:03 PM

CMSFilter: I need a CMS that supports multiple authors *per-post* because many of the authors collaborate. A search on any one author should bring up anything they've been a part of, as well as their own stuff.

I'm getting ready to transition a client of mine from a home-brew CMS that I wrote in 2002 to something more modern. They've got 400 stories that need to be moved.

I'd prefer to use WordPress, as it has nearly every other feature I need (and I have some experience administering WP), but the problem is that this client publishes academic papers, and those papers often have two, and sometimes three, different authors.

In my home-brew system, you'd just tick a checkbox next to each author's name that was to be associated with this paper. Easy-peasy.

WordPress, because of its roots as a blogging tool, really only wants each post to have one single author per post.

I've found a plugin that adds the ability to add a second author, but when you search on that second author, you're returned an empty set. The built-in search function only knows how to respond to the 'official' author, not any that have been tacked on in the post's meta-fields.

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Clearly, if I were to stick with WordPress, what I'd need is for there to be a 'lookup table' consisting of only two fields per row, a field for the post's ID number, and a field for an author's ID number. If a story had more than one author, you'd just add another row with the same post_ID and a different author_ID.

But in order to make a nice list of checkbox-able author names in the WordPress admin area, I'd have to (I'm assuming) hack the core files of the system.

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So, before I roll up my sleeves and dig into all of this PHP, are there *ANY* CMSes out there that are setup (either natively or via plugins) for multiple-authors-per-post without a great deal of effort?

posted by Wild_Eep to computers & internet (10 comments total)

I have a multi-user blog in Wordpress and we use author tags. Would that be acceptable?
posted by GuyZero at 1:12 PM on October 24, 2007

Possibly, as long as searching remains effective. Have a URL I can check out for the public-facing parts?
posted by Wild_Eep at 1:20 PM on October 24, 2007

I work with the Movable Type team, and I know there are plugins to make this sort of many-author mapping possible. (A cursory search yields this plugin, which isn't exactly what you want, but gives you an idea.) You also have the advantage of things like multiple authors and blogs being built in to the system, instead of in a separate fork of the app.
posted by anildash at 2:10 PM on October 24, 2007

Plone has a Contributors multi-line field on each content item indexed for search. Content also has a sharing tab to allow multiple authors to work on a single content item. Content locking per author is supported. Each author has a page showing all content items for that author.
posted by 3.2.3 at 2:32 PM on October 24, 2007

Drupal can do this is a few different ways, but none are " out of the box" solutions. Ostensibly, you would have an initial author and then various "user roles" would be allowed to revise said article.
posted by BrodieShadeTree at 2:32 PM on October 24, 2007

Just use tags in WP.
posted by Jairus at 3:02 PM on October 24, 2007

The Everything engine does exactly this, and much, much more. It's no walk in the park to set up though.
posted by ReiToei at 3:14 PM on October 24, 2007

Drupal, with CCK and Node Reference, can do this.
posted by spitbull at 3:33 PM on October 24, 2007

I didn't remember to mention that there would be around 40 authors to this system.
posted by Wild_Eep at 8:59 AM on October 25, 2007

All the more reason to just use tags.
posted by Jairus at 5:28 PM on October 27, 2007