Author nodes

Do you mean like the "People" pages on narcis (http://www.narcis.nl/search/coll/person/Language/en)?

Ron --

As always the work you do here is outstanding and much appreciated. I don't think a "People" node is really necessary as a custom "profile" based content type can be built using CCK. What is needed, instead, I think, is a way to join Biblio's author id numbers to a custom profile type node (from here on I'll just call them "People" nodes). Here is the scenario we face here at OSU, and other universities probably face this as well:

Colleges would like to be able to display Biblio publications that are related to their faculty, research fellows, etc.
Not all "People" are necessarily members of the site, or even employees of the university, though, so they have no existing profile/Drupal UID and can't leverage Biblio's nifty built in "my publications" feature.
So, a custom "People" node type is created and used as a profile page. These are actually often maintained by office specialists and student workers, not by the faculty themselves.

Here's where the problem lies:

This custom "People" node type must have a field for the biblio author id number, to join it to the Biblio entries, but there is no way to create anything such as a user reference field that gracefully pops the author ids into the profile.

Here is the clunky workaround I currently use:

I created an ugly ugly query based on biblio_contributor_data - it gives a LONG, ungainly list of all the author ids and their names. I put this in a block that only appears when a node is in create or edit mode. It is really hackish but at least exposes the author ids to the office assistants who are doing the data entry.

The biblio_db_search function is used in a block that displays biblio content when the "People" content type is displayed. If there are no publications for that individual, the phrase "No items found" displays (what would be desired would just be for the block to hide itself).

What might work much better:

The addition, within CCK, of a "Biblio Author Reference" similar to the already existing "Nodereference" and "Userreference" widgets.

The addition of Biblio's author id to View's fields and the ability to establish a relationship between Biblio authors and a "People" node type.

This, of course, is a really simplified overview, but something like this this might be able to close the gap between Biblio, CCK, and Views. It would also provide a great deal of flexibility for Biblio queries in Views, which would be so awesome.

It's probably a little late in the game now, as I realize there's been quite a bit of work put into Biblio regarding aligning it with CCK/Fields and getting it ready for Drupal 7 - but perhaps it might be something to think about.

Thanks again for all of the work you do here. You've made many folks here really happy with this excellent module.

Best Regards,

Sher

Thanks for the input Sher,

I'm putting together a site right now where I too will likely be facing the same issues, so this may come sooner rather than later :-) I'll look into the idea of a "Biblio Author Reference" that sounds like a good one.

Ron.

I've implemented a similar hack to the one used by Sher, based around the code Ron provided in http://drupal.org/node/979108. If we could have better integration of Views, CCK and the Author ID's, this module would achieve the status of double awesome. I look forward to "Biblio Author Reference".

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