Publishers and authors: a better way?

Hi

I'm keen to hear if anyone has a better way to do this!!

I've been developing a site that will have registered users (with role "publisher") who can publish other people's contributed stories but the contributing authors need not be registered-users themselves.

"Publishers" can also author their own stories.

I wanted to acknowledge the publisher who posted the story, as well as the author of the content.

The problem with the content-profile module is that it only allows one "author-profile" per user, so using content-profile would mean creating 'dummy' user accounts for every contributing author -- messy. And it would preclude easy acknolwedgement and referencing of the publisher etc.

So instead I simply ignored the content profile "use as profile"module after I started a new content type "author-profile".

Then for story nodes I created a CCK field "Story content by" using node-reference to the author profile (which included name, and relevant author details). I set the node-reference to "Required", with 1 possible selection to force an author for every story. I also included an 'anonymous' author profile for those who contributed content but were too shy or for whatever reason didn't want to be acknowledged publicly.

Authors can also be users, but need not be. Obviously any user who wants to author a story needs to create an author-profile. So in effect they are both publisher and author.

Next I created a node-referrer field for the Author-profile which referrs to all nodes that referred to that author -- this allows block grouping "other stories by this author" (with some php to pass relevant arguments) and also to show a list of articles by the author on the author's profile page.

Finally, I included a user-reference CCK field for the author-profile which links back to a user (in those cases where an author is also a user). This field is hidden, with access to user profiles turned off in the permissions for anonymous users. This means that any links to the content-author profile doesn't also show their user profile which would only confuse matters.

In the settings I included 'back link" so that the user then includes a reference to his/her author profile (but since the access user profiles is switched off for anonymous uers, this is only visible to registered users).

Then, using "submitted by" module, I changed all the user-author tokens to content-author tokens, as well as doing the same in the URL aliases, so that the url reads like ... /story/fred-smith/latest-travels.html or similar, where 'fred-smith' is the content-author, not the user-author.

Since the story 'requires' a content-author, users are forced to create a content-author profile if they wish to publish their own stories, or those of others.

Also have a welcome message for new users to create their author-profiles before attempting to post any stories.

Working okay so far (reasonably new site, so time will tell).

As I mentioned, I'm keen to hear if anyone has a better way to do this.

Steve