More Than Cat Diaries: Publishing With Weblogs: LTA Authors

Graphic by Alan Levine

Authors Page Compared for Old and New LTA Site

Notes: Authors Page Compared for Old and New LTA Site

The Authors archive needed a means to display all of the LTA authors and the items they had published.

MovableType's database did not provide the exact data needed to replicate the features of the old site's author archives. Usernames in MovableType are not necessarily the display name, e.g. a user name might be alevine where the display name should be "Alan Levine". While this can be achived using the author nickname, there would be no way to sort alphabetically.
There is no field available to store an author's affiliation (although later discovery of the XXXXX plugin could have provided a way to archive our results without the method described below).
The only way to achieve this would be a large template with manually defined MovableType Entries tags, one for each author:
```
<$MTEntries author=xxxxgt;...

.....
```
which would need to be manually edited for each new author.
There is no way to define co-authors of the same entry.
Our solution was to create additional database tables for author information that could be queried to dynamically generate the authors page (using PHP and calls to the MySQL database.
More details provided in the next slide

See the examples...