Sandbox

Hi Joomla friends

The project.....

I currently have a working CMS that I built myself, but it has one extra function that Joomla does not; that I think would be a great tool to ad. I probably don't have the Joomla know how to develop this from the backend myself; but suppose I'm willing to have a go - realising it's probably a huge learning curve.

The function I have in my existing CMS is that one article / content item can have multiple authors. Now - 'authors' is probably not the right word to use here, as 'authors' in Joomla usually means someone with editing rights to that article; what I'm really saying though is that each article can be attributed to multiple people. Thus when displaying a specific article publically, there is a clickable list of each person, who they are and other articles by the same person.

What I envisage the tool I'm thinking about would have is....
1. an extra tab in the article editing page, maybe called 'Attribute to....' (ie to avoid confusing this with a Joomla Author or Editor)
2. that tab lists each of my "attributed to" people - each with a tick box beside them so that multiple people can be ticked to go with this article when it is saved (it may also need a pagination feature depending on how many "attributed to" people there are)
3. The data for my 'attributed to' people could easily be drawn from a specific category; however - what ideally this would have is a 'first name' / 'last name' distinction - so maybe the 'Title' tag of a standard article / content item, is not the best way to do this; maybe it needs a unique database table of it's own.
4. The other thing that my current CMS has is a small checking routine that when a new author is added, if there is one the same, or similar already in the database of authors, there is a warning - ie found this one, are you sure you want to add one the same? (Yes / No)

Any ideas - or if anyone has already seen a component that works like this, please let me know.

Cheers

Ian

Hi,

this sounds very interesting and regaring the simple fact that it's a common practice in printed publications to have multiple authors it should indeed become a feature.

Trouble with current Joomla! is the association of "authors" and users.
You'd need a list of names which could potentionally come from the Contacts component using a dedicated group of "Authors" to choose from. That's be the simplest hack I can picture right now. Howver this alone woudn't solve the relationship of people and names: known as alias or pseudonym. Many authors (the persons) use different names for their publications *and* once a name was used for such work it must not change later, i.e. Richard Bachman (the author name) is Stephen King (the person). Book published by Richard will *never* appear under a listing of Mr. King.
I would probably never "publish" (as print) anything under my forum nickname but my real name, nonetheless any "posts" I made as CirTap should probably remain associated with this "author name" :-)

It'd be interesting to learn how you implemented this in "your CMS".

CirTap

CirTap wrote:You'd need a list of names which could potentionally come from the Contacts component using a dedicated group of "Authors" to choose from.

Yes - I suppose that makes sense although the current contacts component still only lists 'name' rather than first name / last name (unless 1.5 is different)

CirTap wrote:Many authors (the persons) use different names for their publications *and* once a name was used for such work it must not change later, i.e. Richard Bachman (the author name) is Stephen King (the person). Book published by Richard will *never* appear under a listing of Mr. King.

This issue probably doesn't matter in what I need; but I can see how it could be useful to others.

CirTap wrote:It'd be interesting to learn how you implemented this in "your CMS".

As my CMS is very simple compared to Joomla; it's simply a lookup table. I only have one admin  user who can add / edit articles (so the 'author' issue doesn't exist). On the article edit / add interface I simply have 3 columns of known authors / tick box next to each so that I can attribute the article to a number of authors. Authors are added independently (with 'checking routine' that I mentioned int he first post). Downside is that a new author has to be added before adding an article (ie haven't built anything for adding an author 'on the fly'; or add article first, then add author, and then edit article, attributing article to the new author).

One workaround that I have been playing with (that isn't particularly intuitive) is to manually type each author's name into the keywords meta tag, and then use the related content module (slightly modified to only look at my category of authors) to find that author, and use a mambot to display the authors on the page, with hyperlink to each author. But as I said - not intuitive - and will lead to errors with typo's of names etc.

I don't really want to start hacking Joomla code, and so I suppose it may be worth the learning curve of how to do a few things in Joomla; what I have done to date is all in 1.0.13; but wondering if I should migrate what I have done so far to 1.5 to continue development.

PS Played with Joomlamag? as it has an author component - very nice; BUT also relies on one article having one author.

So - (dumb question I suppose) - is it possible to add a new tab to the article editing / adding box, without actually hacking core code? ie a component that can be installed that adds a new tab? (I think I have seen another component I have added at one stage do this, but not 100% sure)

The reason for this dumb question is that I want what I build to be compatible with eg patches / updates in the future, and a hack of the core Joomla code is likely to get broken on each update :-)

Thanks

Ian