Adding Authors to Pages

For websites where you want to categorize the arciles by author use the text collections or text groups to add the authors. In this tutorial you will better understand the level of abstraction using the text collections to achieve this.

Here are the steps to create few authors.

1. Goto your Admin->Site Content->Content Management.
2. Create new text groups by clicking on the right the new button.
3. Setup the details, Content Group Name is the Author's Name.
4. Setup the Content Type to be Text Pages Collection
5. In the Description Field add some biography for the author.
6. In the sort order field setup a number to specify the order of display.
7. Tick the box so the author which is basically a collection of text pages will be visible on the web-front.

Now you want to assign text pages that correspond to a particular author.

1. Select the author (the text group/collection) click on the left the arrow down icon
2. On the list of pages click entries to list the available text pages
3. Tick the boxes on the left of the text pages assiciated with the author
4. Click insert. The text collection lists now, all page assigned to the author.
5. Setup the order using the sequence input boxes, so the articles will display with the given order.
6. Depending where the articles are displayed you can also change the alternative titles
7. Tick all the boxes on the left (using the tick icon you can click just once)
8. Then click update to save the changes.

So everything is created now on the admin end. What still needs to be done is to display the authors to the website front-end. So let's say you wanted to display the authors to the right side of the stock template. Here are the steps to setup the authors display.

1. Goto your Admin->Site Content->Content Management.
2. Select the Right Side Entries mixed collection, click the left arrow down icon to list the current entries
3. Select all existing entries (use the checkboxes) then click delete to empty the right side entries collection.
4. Click entries to list all the collections
5. Select the authors (in other words the text collection) you created using the checkboxes.
6. Click insert to assign the authors to the Right Side Entries mixed collection
7. On the list page of the Right Side Entries setup the sequence how the authors should appear
8. Tick all boxes on the left hit the update button to save the changes.

The methodology used here, can be adapted to other relatioships among entities. This is not an exclusive authors to articles association. Text Collections are effectively different sets of content pages with a title.

This concludes the tutorial, you now have a much better understanding of the abstraction the various collection types offer.