We have a Joomla site with a few people managing it, adding articles written by numerous other authors. I would like to set the author name for each article and show it in the front end in the article info box (and possibly work with it in other ways like listing all articles by the same author).
Could you please explain to me a little bit about the treatment of article authors in Joomla? In the administration of articles in the tab Publishing there are fields Created By, Created by Alias and Author. Created By is apparently the username of the Joomla user who actually created the Article, while Created by Alias and Author can be freely edited. What I find baffling is that a column labelled Author in the back end list of articles shows values from the fields Created By and Created by Alias rather than the field Author. Is it a mistake or is there any reason why it is labelled this way? Same in the front end: When I set the Show Author option to 'Show', then what appears in the info box of the article is either the Created By or Created by Alias value instead of the Author value. From what I found out, the only thing the Author field does is that it adds a <meta name="author"> tag. But there is no indication in the administration that this field only applies to metadata, so I find it quite misleading. Or have I missed something?
Anyway, how can I achieve what I asked in the beginning? I find it useful (though not necessary) to keep a distinction between who created the article in the system (the editor working with Joomla) vs. who is the author of the text being published. Or do I have to create fake Joomla users for all the authors of the texts and assign the articles to them? And what if there is a text with multiple authors? What is the best practice to do these things? Thanks in advance for an explanation.
