Blog authors pages

[ilg-ul]

Have you read the Contributing Guidelines on issues?

• I have read the Contributing Guidelines on issues.

Description

Similarly to tag grouping pages, generate

• a page with a list of author names, grouped by letters
• pages with posts published by each author, possibly paged

Also add a list of authors with links at the end of each post.


Has this been requested on Canny?

No.

Motivation

For blogs with multiple authors, it is useful to identify posts contributed by each author.

API design

To control this new feature add a generateAuthorsPages option; when set to true, the authors pages are generated as blog/authors and blog/authors/${name}.

Have you tried building it?

The functionality is implemented in cronica-it@7465833.

The implementation adds a NamedAuthor type, similar to Tag and the code is basically a duplicate of the tag logic.

Self-service

• I'd be willing to contribute this feature to Docusaurus myself.

[slorber]

👍 looks like a useful feature, that I wanted to add already.

I'm not a fan of your UI and API design, but we can iterate on that.

IMHO we should generate an author page for all authors.yaml authors by default, and have an option to opt-out.

It's not clear to me what the UX should be to access an author page, considering we already have author.url

---

Your post has a missing screenshot but I guess you wanted to post this?

This doesn't look like a great UX to me 😅
Authors are already presented at the beginning of blog posts so it's weird to add them at the bottom too IMHO.

[ilg-ul]

IMHO we should generate an author page for all authors.yaml authors by default, and have an option to opt-out.

Sure, but we have to make the name mandatory, now it is not.

This doesn't look like a great UX to me

It isn't, the whole implementation was a copy/paste from the Tags code.

Authors are already presented at the beginning of blog posts so it's weird to add them at the bottom too IMHO.

Sure, feel free to use a better solution.

[slorber]

IMHO we'd rather first introduce the ability to have "social icons" next to the author's name, similar to what many blogs do:

https://web.dev/blog/array-with

This would enable us to be able to click on the author's name to access the author page and see a paginated list of posts for each author.

Some other examples of sites having author pages:

• https://www.smashingmagazine.com/author/geoff-graham/
• https://css-tricks.com/author/chriscoyier/

[ilg-ul]

we'd rather first introduce the ability to have "social icons" next to the author's name

Sure, that's a nice improvement, however I'm not convinced that logically it is ok to mix social icons with posts grouping.

From my point of view, the author pages are basically in the same logical class as the tags pages and the Archive page, they all show sub-lists of posts grouped by various criteria (year, tag, author name).

Personally I like the layout used in the Archive page, and I'd prefer it in the Tags and Authors pages too, with the same 3 columns layout, and sub-lists with date and title, obviously with the year replaced by the tag label or author name.

What do you think about such a consistent solution for all three grouping pages?

[slorber]

Maybe this grouping makes sense for your case, but it is not the kind of experience you expect from a multi-author blog.

See what popular multi-author blogs do:

• https://css-tricks.com/author/chriscoyier/
• https://www.smashingmagazine.com/author/geoff-graham/

And I could show you many more similar examples.

Note Chris Coyier wrote thousands of posts on the CSS Trick blog (he created it).
Pagination is not really an option if we want to enable this kind of scale:

Now I'm ok to let you have an option to disable pagination in author pages.

We already have a postsPerPage option: https://docusaurus.io/docs/api/plugins/@docusaurus/plugin-content-blog#postsPerPage

Number of posts to show per page in the listing page. Use 'ALL' to display all posts on one listing page.

Why not postsPerAuthorPage: "ALL"

Then you can swizzle the author page and decide to sort, group, and display the posts of that author the way you want. You can order the post by date, event_date, last update time or whatever you want, implement your own layout, and group the posts by whatever attribute or custom front matter.

[ilg-ul]

Hi Sébastien @slorber, do you have any estimate when the authors pages will be implemented?

I saw a lot of new features in the latest releases, and I'm kind of stuck to my old fork, since updating my implementation for the authors pages would require some efforts, not justified if you'll reimplement them properly.

[slorber]

Hi

My apprentice @OzakIOne is working on a showcase plugin atm. Once it's ready we'll work on the blog authors plugin. I can't guarantee this will be implemented this month, but the goal is to ship it asap, likely this quarter.