Author, Author

Author, Author!

The author selection bit is a bit misleading. Let's say, for example, that a user named Henry submits a story to your site using the Submit News module. You review the story, make a few corrections (Henry never did understand HTML all that well), and approve the story for posting. That makes you the author, not Henry. Kind of annoying, actually.

So how do you get additional authors? You actually have to make additional administrators, which PHP-Nuke also calls authors. You do so using the Edit Admins item on the Administration menu, something I'll cover in a lot more detail in Topic 46, "Administering Users and Admins." However, the short story is that administrators (or authors, or whatever) are a separate set of user accounts on your site. When you make an administrator, you can determine what they are an administrator of. For example, by making someone an administrator just of articles, you give him the ability to post new stories without you getting to review them. This user then is the "author of record" for those stories and shows up in the Authors drop-down list box in the Search module.

It's likely that you'll grant this authority only to someone who spent a great deal of time helping you with your site; it wouldn't make sense to make every user on your site an author. So, unfortunately, the Search module doesn't provide an easy way to look for stories that were submitted by a specific user. Kind of annoying, but there it is.