Blog: author profile list file

[Josh-Cena]

🚀 Feature

A separate author profile list file to prevent duplicating author information in every markdown front matter.

Have you read the Contributing Guidelines on issues?

Yes

Has this been requested on Canny?

Actually yes. https://docusaurus.io/feedback/p/add-unified-authors-data-file-to-reduce-header-attributes-for-blog-posts

Motivation

I am building an org blog where three authors take turns to write posts. Maintaining three sets of author information is a pain, especially when their avatars/description changes. Having a separated data file will make this much easier.

From the canny request:

In Jekyll, there's a authors.yml file that stores all authors' profile which includes social media links, author title and avatar url, so that we could just put only author attribute in blog header without author_title, author_url, author_image_url... in every post.

API Design

The Jekyll design, just for reference. We can have a /blog/data/authors.yml (JSON can work as well, of course), in which we put all the authors:

- Author 1:
    name: ...
    url: ...
    image_url: ....
    title: ...
- Author 2:
    name: ...
    url: ...
    image_url: ....
    title: ...

And then use them with a new author_key: Author 1 front matter in a blog post. User can still override those values in authors.yml within the post's front matter for more granular control.

Have you tried building it?

Not yet, would be willing to work on it

[slorber]

Yes we should definitively support that, as long as we can stay retrocompatible with existing frontmatter.

My blog Gatsby theme (Novela) also has such feature: https://github.com/slorber/sebastienlorber.com/tree/master/content/authors

[shakyapeiris]

That means we need only to store that data in a json/yml file right?

[Josh-Cena]

@shakyapeiris Yes, although you can't be exempted from front matter entirely though because you have to use an author_key front matter to reference that external data

[shakyapeiris]

Ok Thanks

[slorber]

We also have a need for blog posts with multiple authors.

#4527

So we'd likely use a frontmatter like author_ids: [author1, author2] to support that.

Not sure it's worth supporting multiple authors with existing frontmatter attributes. It would probably require a breaking change so that the existing frontmatter can support the list, so we may do this but later.

Note: author image URL can use a co-located asset in the folder's blog post now. Not sure we need this feature for "global blog authors" though

[Josh-Cena]

Note: author image URL can use a co-located asset in the folder's blog post now. Not sure we need this feature for "global blog authors" though

I tried a very rough implementation and I noticed it's hard to co-locate assets in the global file. I guess we can only support using URLs to reference images in global files, but allow overriding this with a collocated image in front matter?

We can certainly make author_key accept multiple IDs

[Josh-Cena]

There has also been requests for author pages:

• https://docusaurus.io/feature-requests/p/add-all-authors-and-posts-by-author-to-ease-list-posts-by-author-in-blog
• https://docusaurus.io/feature-requests/p/blog-author-pages
• https://docusaurus.io/feature-requests/p/add-athors-page-like-tags-page (this one's description seems to be requesting multi-author blog posts though)

After we have unique author keys this feature may be easier to implement?