Adding Co-Authors

One of the requirements for a magazine displaying academic and near-academic papers is the ability to cope with co-authors. As standard, WordPress only supports a single author and that author has to be set up as a user. Now it’s possible to make then only a subscriber, but I still dislike the equivalence between author and user. It’s a hangover from WP as a blogging platform which doesn’t really fit WP as CMS.

There are plugins which offer co-author support but there seemed to be gaps and issues in all of them. There is also the standard risk with plugins that the author may stop supporting it. On balance, none of them met my needs.

Since WP2.8 though, there has been an alternative – creative a new Writer custom taxonomy to replace author. It’s easy in WP2.8/WP2.9 to add a taxonomy (and should be even easier in WP3.0). This is what I added to functions.php. Firstly a hook to call the code to create the taxonomy when WordPress initialises:

add_action( 'init', 'create_w_taxonomies', 0 );

Then the code to create the taxonomy itself:

function create_w_taxonomies() {register_taxonomy( 'writer', 'post', array( 'hierarchical' => false, 'label' => 'Writer', 'query_var' => true, 'rewrite' => true ) );
}

You’ll gather from the function name that in the live installation, I am adding a number of taonimies. It’s how I have done What? Where? When? and Who?

Then the taxonomy needs to be displayed.  That will depend on your theme.  I can post up how I did it in Hybrid if anybody wants the solution I adopted.