Hi,
I’m a bit new to WP (though learning quickly by the crash course of actual website design :p), and I wanted to run this idea by y’all to make sure it’s possible before I try it.
I want to use ACF to handle my post authors. This is mainly because I want multiple authors, and I would like to do this instead of using Co-Authors Plus simply because I can throw this in my own field group and also have more control over the data.
But since the idea of a post’s author seems so fundamental to how WP works, I assume I need some good integration.
I was thinking this:
- Make a repeater field for authors and give it a unique name and minimum one row.
- Edit my templates to display authors using this field instead of the normal one.
- Edit my author posts page to filter by whether the user appears anywhere in my new field.
- Edit my author posts counter similarly.
- Add a function in my child theme to perform an action on the post save or update hook, which gets my field, takes the first value, and saves it under WP’s default author field.
I know I can easily do 1 and 2 now, and I’ve bookmarked some ACF docs on 3 and 4 and I understand that they should be possible. 5 is the trouble. I haven’t coded anything like it yet, but I think I can figure it out. It seems like an important one to me because, of course, if some later manager of the site wants to export these posts to a different install or different theme, it’d better have at least some of this author info.
Does this plan make sense? Is it all possible and a good way of doing this?
Thanks for your opinion!
…Or perhaps just a custom field for “additional authors” that doesn’t infringe on default WP stuff, just gets displayed…
