WordPress Multiple Authors Plugin

Yesterday I began to realize that WordPress (the software that manages the content you are reading now) might not be able to do something we need on this site: the capability to record and communicate that several people have authored an article.

WordPress is fine in cases where multiple authors write different articles on a single website, and we’ve been doing this; but this doesn’t account for the more general case where WordPress is used for writing longer articles, where there’s editing, rewriting, proof reading and real co-authorship.

A very good place to get answers when they’re not in the Codex is the wordpress IRC channel, so I ventured a question yesterday:

ear1grey asks you all to don your best wordpress-guru lapel badges and ceremonial hats for a lightly-salted technical question:
ear1grey:WordPress supports multiple authors, but can it support multiple authors on the same post – i.e. if x and y have both edited a post, do they both appear as it’s authors… or has such capability ever/never been suggested before?
MCincubus:Never seen that suggested. Wwait… yes I have. once.
tunicwriter:Interesting suggestion…
MCincubus:I’d consider writing a plugin for that. Could store additional authors in post meta.
ear1grey:I’m thinking of cases where the wife and I write a post together so it’s not specifically from the viewpoint of me, or her – one of us will typically write while the other proofs, edits and re-writes.
MCincubus:It’s a good suggestion. Bookmark this and check in tomorrow. I might try to whip up a plugin today. That sounds cool.

Well; I checked back today and, would you believe it, MCIncubus has delivered the goods by implementing the requested functionality as a WordPress plugin. What’s more I’ve installed it and it works like a charm (e.g.).

Thanks!

This, in a nutshell is why open source software works. You don’t necessarily need to be able to code to make the system better, you just have to have the ideas and the community can pick them up, run with them, and often release code enhancements within 24 hours. Compare this to the slow world of single-vendor software where upgrades come around once per year if you’re lucky, and then you have to pay for them.

This is thinking aloud, and having your thoughts made reality, instantly.

8 Comments

Max Dykstra says:

19/02/2006 at 00:04

I totally agree with you… While open source software usually runs more security risks, it also fixes those problems and adds new features faster than any other method. Good open source software is really hard to beat with money.

Max D.

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Peter Giger says:

06/10/2006 at 04:16

Thank you for this post. It will be perfect in my research about openess, participation and communication, web 2…

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Xander says:

17/11/2006 at 17:10

Does anyone know the name of the wordpress plugin that creates a list of your posts in a category instead of just displaying them one after the other? I want it so that when someone clicks on a category they just get a list of posts from that category.

I'm sure Ive seen one…and sifting through the WP site is a nightmare

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Kristopher says:

12/12/2006 at 21:09

What I want to do on my blog, is every few hours take the oldest post and move it to the
front of the queue, all automatically. Anyone know if there is a plugin that can do this or
a simple way to set up another plugin to do this (use my own feed perhaps)?
Thanks.

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Matt Bernier says:

02/10/2007 at 15:10

Do you think that you could zip this plugin up and make a downloadable link here on the site for it?
txfx.com is no longer available, and this is a plugin that I could definitely use.

Also, if you can make this available, I will support it and any changes that need to be made to it, so it will work with up-to-date versions of WordPress.

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drew3000 says:

11/11/2007 at 20:37

Hilarious. I was thinkng the same thing while googling for a plugin that tackled this vary task. I was getting ready to post something a friend and I have been working on and was sitting there dithering over who to attribute it it and then thought, “someone else by now has thoguht of this, and likely did something about it.”

Thanks for the link and also verifying my ideas on Open Source.

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Weston Ruter says:

30/12/2007 at 11:04

Iâ€™ve written a new WordPress plugin called â€œCo-Authorsâ€ that is inspired by this plugin. It is more efficient in that it stores the user ID instead of the user nicename.

Features include:

1. listing all co-authored posts in an authorâ€™s posts page and feed
2. extending the â€œPost Authorâ€ box in the interface sidebar so that adding new co-authors to a post is seamless
3. providing new template tags which make it easier to display each co-author with a link to their posts page and other items
4. including a modified version of wp_list_authors that takes into account posts with co-authors
5. defining a co-author iterator class that can be used for stepping through all of a postâ€™s co-authors

See more on the Co-Author Plugin page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/co-authors/

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