How can WP be used with author bylines?
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I’ve painstakingly created a WordPress site, got a beautiful theme, hacked in a basic author byline and began the transition from Joomla. And then I realized that, at least with WordPress 2.3, it still doesn’t want to behave as anything more than a basic blog with a bunch of widgets and not as more of a publishing system for news. I’m hoping that someone can provide answers or an insight with 2.5.
The problem I’ve had is that while you can have many different authors “blog”, there is no handling of how to manage the following easily, except for manual insertion of static text in each post!
(1) A dedicated author page where you can place an author bio, picture and have links to all their articles. Instead it is just a list of all articles which includes all the text down to the “more” tag. I’m assuming I can get rid of the latter but not having author pages is criminal and hope there is a plugin.
(2) There is no place either before or at the end of WP which allows you to insert text, e.g. copyright information, contact information, or something about the author. Manually inserting text doesn’t work because that “about the author” text is used as the preview text on the home page instead of the beginning of the article.
(3) An inability to create an optional excerpt at the beginning of an article that might contain a short summary instead of having to use the more tag. Instead of just having tags, most cmses that are more basic than blogs have a short “description of the article” text space that is ignore and “up to more tag” is used if there is no description.
(4) Pagination is terrible. There is no simple and cosmetically appealing forward and back page navigation with page numbers in the middle. There should be a function like wpnavi for each post, not just the front page when you’ve got spillover of articles in a section.
(5) There is no prebuilt quicktag menu that you can simply insert with the majority of the most used tags in it, e.g. more, nextpage and several other items you’d find on the toolbar in every cms.
While I really thought I could use Joomla, I’m wondering what using wordpress was a good idea. It’s almost as though the movement isn’t sure whether it’s a blog or a publishing system for multiple authors. It doesn’t treat the latter very well at all nor properly allow for the common metdata fields you’d expect to find in most publishing systems.
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It sounds like wordpress.com is not for you. Most likely what you are going to have to do is to get a web host and a domain name, and install the software from wordpress.org and then hack a template and the underlying wordpress files to do what you want to do. If you do not have experience with php programming, then you will most likely have to hire someone to do it for you.
Your other choice, as you say would be Joomla or another dedicated CMS.
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So what you’re saying is that WordPress still lacks a focus on it’s target audience of users. If it wants to be a single focus single user blog, that’s what it should have focused upon instead of now touting itself to being a hybrid of something. All these magazine style templates are for whom exactly? If it’s got multi-author capability, why didn’t anyone think of the fact that each of these authors would need their own “about” page instead of one about page for the entire blog/mag/publication?
I’m wondering where the years of development went since I left WordPress since I fail to see the basic improvements. It didn’t dawn on anyone that including a basic set of most commonly used quicktags like “more” and “nextpage” couldn’t be included stock in the visual editor or in the downloadable package? The answer, from what you’re telling me, is that unfortunately the developers in charge of this project haven’t given the practical usage much thought. Instead it continues along the “minimalist is best” mindset which if clung to without good reason leaves you neither truly here nor there.
I have a dedicated server, many domains, have integrated WordPress with an existing site, and have php/mysql experience but have just realized still how limited WP truly is. I moved to WP because of the pingability, better SEO and several other supposed benefits of WP over Joomla. And as bad as Joomla is, it still does seem to get the job done as a small publishing tool for several authors. WP remains best and only suited for a blogger replacement for an individual author.
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Of additional note, I can’t edit my reply and the forums are a mess. In the age of easy navigation in forums, we’re still stuck with the “web 2.0” appearance of tags, tag clouds and search instead of an easy to navigate drill down to find what you need and the responses to your posts. Why use these archaic forums in a development environment? I have no idea except for the rigid adherence to the “minimalist is best” approach in trying to organize a great deal of information. That fails miserably and perhaps explains some of the dizzying confusion and misdirection here.
Yes, I know that WP represents a great deal more than what people pay for it. What is disappointing is seeing a great project and opportunity plod onwards in the dusk.
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