How do deal with Multiple Article Authors (with/without K2)

Question

I have got in our company Joomla publication software to care about.

We are using Joomla to publish technical magazine articles. Mostly one article have 2-3 authors. In the past the admins solved this multiplicity with placing all author names in the beginning of article text. But this is not optimal for search article by authors, where the articles are showing only by the author which is assigned in the Article author-column.

I have looked for some module which allow us the multiple-author functionality, but without success.

And I’m not a Joomla expert to build my own extension. I got an idea how do this anyway:

Do you know some extension that can do some “Relations”?

It means that will create table where will be stored ID from Author with ID from Article? For example the Drupal CMS has Relation module to achieve this. From this database table I can do the operations we needed to show in frontend. My idea is described on this image.

We are using the K2 extension, but here in the “Extra fields” CCK we cannot add the extra field with Authors.

We are looking for solution with or withouth K2 extension.

I hope that some extension will be suitable to our problem, we don have capacity to hardcode this feature.

Answer 1

I have done the same thing for research journal last year in Joomla 2.5. I needed to use Community Builder for the author profiles. Look here for example: http://www.bwpat.de/ausgabe/25/schwarz-bretschneider

Then I used the extension fieldsattach to add a new field for the author IDs (and some more fields). In this field the author IDs in the correct order are manually written, i.e. 1345,2651

I copied the module article author and changed to code to get multiple authors. So now on each article page the authors are shown automatically in the right column.

And in the template overrides I could also get the author information from the CB user table, to show the author names and institutions just after the heading.

Edit: For showing the articles in the CB user profile (=author), I added a CB query field where I would look up the article id in the fieldsattach value table:

SELECT fa.articleid,fa.value,con.title FROM xxxx_fieldsattach_values AS fa LEFT JOIN (xxxx_content AS con) ON (con.id = fa.articleid) WHERE fa.fieldsid = '14' AND fa.value LIKE '%[user_id]%'

And in the row field I would add:

<li><a href="index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=[column_articleid]">[column_title]</a></li>

Answer 2

If the main concern is front end search then you could just switch to using tags for displaying the authors' names. Then you can add author information to the tag for each author and when you clicked the tag you'd get the author information plus the list of all items created by that author. You could also make a menu link for each author if you wanted to have some more control over the urls and layouts. As a practical matter that really depends on how many authors you're talking about and how much you want to automate.

You could also make a contact record for each author and tag that. Doing that would let you have more fields than just what you get in the tag description plus have the "contact me" form if you wanted.

Then there are some display selected tags modules around that would let you display the list of articles with that author tag. There is one from last year's summer of code that is good for that but it's also very easy to make your own module.

You could make a plugins to manage some parts of this also.