Additional Authors for Blog Post

[Thicklaces]

Hello,

Is it possible to add authors for blog post without giving out staff accounts? I'm the one who uploads the content so I don't need to give them accounts. I don't see the option to add names. 

[Rae]

Hi, @Thicklaces! 

Rae from Shopify here. Thanks for reaching out with this question. 

At this time, the author of each blog post can only be attributed to the store owner, or to an employee with a staff account on your site. We have more information on this in this help document under step 5. 

With this in mind, I recommend creating staff accounts for the authors of your blog posts, but restricting their account permissions so that they can only view certain parts of your store's admin. This will help protect your store's information, and ensure that any details you don't want viewed by staff are kept private. Once you've created staff accounts for these individuals, you will still be able to add in the blog posts from your end, but now their names will appear in the 'Author' drop-down selection, so you can add the correct person as the author of each post. 

I understand this workaround may not be completely ideal for how you handle staff accounts on your site, so I'm going to share this information with our developers. Our teams review comments and feedback like this as a means to improve the features on our platform, so these details are really helpful for us to receive. 

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about this set up, and I'll be glad to continue helping out! 

[jaba23]

Hello,

I'm having the same issue with my account. 

I don't see a reason to have staff accounts if they are only going to blog. Even if I upgrade, I'm restricted to 5 or 15 staff members. This doesn't give me the flexibility of adding new authors.

Also, what happens if I want collaborators from outside my organization to create blog posts for my store? Do I need to create a staff account for them? How does this make any sense?

And adding a generic name like STORE STAFF won't help either because that eliminates the personalization of the posts.

Please help here.

[Rae]

Hi, @jaba23! 

Thank you for reaching out with these points. I appreciate you outlining how this impacts your business, and I absolutely understand your concerns. 

At this time, the only way to assign an author to a blog post is by adding that author to your site with their own staff account, as mentioned above. 

However, I understand that this workaround may not work for you, so I'm going to share your feedback on this with our team, as well. If we make any changes to how blog authors are handled, we'll share more details about this on our changelog, so make sure to keep an eye out there. 

In the meantime though, can you tell me a bit more about the structure of your blog, the types of articles you share, and how many different authors you require?

[jaba23]

Thanks for replying @Rae.

Before I answer your questions, can you tell me how my answers will help with my issue? If I write a certain type of article or have a certain structure, will the issue get fixed faster?

Thanks

[Rae]

Hi, @jaba23! 

I appreciate you getting back to me. 

These types of details help our team better understand how your business is impacted by this feature. While providing this extra information doesn't necessarily guarantee that our team will change the way things currently work, any additional context we receive is helpful for us to have while we review your request. 

If you're comfortable sharing these details about your business, I'll be happy to pass this along to our team. 

Thanks! 

[Andreyes7]

Hello
How is now going this topic about blog possibilities for more easy author adding?

[GlobalCupping]

So I am also trying to resolve this situation without having to add guest authors as staff accounts...I see that this has been an ongoing request/issue since about 2018-2019 and it's STILL not been resolved....can someone please update on the status of this request that has apparently been submitted to the 'team' several times over the last few years?

[naxorn]

Just tossing this idea out there.  There may be an app out there that adds this (haven't looked), but if you want a barebones DIY approach you need to do two things:

1. Create a metafield to store the author.  The metafield would be added to the 'blog post' type holding a 'Single line text' value.  Now you can have however many authors and whatever formatting you want.
2. Modify your theme to use the metafield instead of the built-in author.

For example in the Dawn theme you would modify the 'main-article.liquid' file... Specifically this part:

{%- if block.settings.blog_show_author -%}
  <span class="caption-with-letter-spacing" itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
    {%- # You'll need to change article.author to use the metafield (see below) -%}
    <span itemprop="name">{{ article.author }}</span>
  </span>
{%- endif -%}

So if you created a metafield with the namespace and key of 'custom.author', you'd change

article.author

 to

 article.metafields.custom.author.value | default: article.author

Now, if you fill in the author metafield on a blog post's admin page (it will be in a section at the bottom), it will show that otherwise, it will fallback to showing the usual author -- name of owner or staff member.

The worst part about this is when you upgrade your theme... You'll probably need to remove and re-applying this fix each time.

[Kasama_Andrew]

I've done this and restricted their access to the Online Store/Blog posts and pages - but they still are not showing up as a potential author.