Blog Author Pages?

SteveG

I just realized that there is no automatic author page for blog authors. At least not one I can sort out at 1am on a Friday night.

I could add a tag for each author and then build a page based on that. But that doesn't create an automatic link from their name at the top of a blog post. And that all sounds terribly dreadful to do manually.

Does anyone have another / better solution?

visioncraft

Hey, @SteveG, let me start by asking you to please drop by the Ideas Board, if you haven’t done so already, and vote for the request to add automatic author pages to the Blog - which is exactly what you want. It’s already in the backlog, but the more votes it gets, the more likely it is to be implemented sooner rather than later.

Until then, there is no “ideal” solution - only workarounds… Here are some ideas:

Use simple text links for author names

Create the author pages manually, and then make a place in the Blog layout where the user can manually add a text link with the author’s name linked to their page. The blog author or Chief Editor will have to remember to manually create the link for every article. The main drawback to this is that there’s all kinds of human errors that can happen - from spelling the author’s name wrongly to forgetting to put it in at all. The main advantage is that this would probably be the simplest and quickest solution to implement.

Create an API-based custom widget for the author name

This solution has several pre-requisites. First, you’d still need to create author pages manually - either as static site pages or as dynamic pages using an internal collection. Then, you need to be quite comfortable with JavaScript programming, so you could create a custom widget that would do the following:

• get the current blog article author’s name
• find the url of the corresponding author page in the site
• output a simple text link element, with the author name linked to their page

In order to do that you’d have to write some clever JavaScript that would use the API to find the correct page to link the author name to. The main advantage of this approach is that it would give you a reasonably elegant solution you could use on other sites in the future. The main disadvantage is that it will be a lot of work to implement properly, and will require ongoing maintenance.

Create the Blog using collections

Instead of using Duda’s built-in Blog module, you could create your own ‘manual’ Blog, using Collections. This approach has some serious disadvantages: apart from being a lot of work, it would be difficult to reproduce some of the built-in features that Duda gives us by default - like appropriate article meta data that helps with SEO, article searching, and more. Nevertheless, you could indeed create an ‘authors’ collection that could have its own dynamic pages, and which you could use to filter articles, like a category. If your authors are a major feature of your site, this may be an approach worth considering.

Run an external blog

If all else fails, you could - temporarily - run the Blog outside Duda, perhaps in a separate subdomain for the client. The idea being that once Duda eventually implements the features you’re missing, you can import/recreate the client’s articles inside the native Blog. Until then, you can give the client an option by running the Blog in a different platform.

I’m afraid these are all the options that come to mind atm - more experienced Duda Devs might be able to offer more suggestions. Let us know how it works out for you!

SteveG

Thanks for the reply. I had looked through the idea board and didn't find that posting. We are already discussing external blogs rather than trying to force Duda to be a blogging platform.