Multi-Author Mode

A website may have multiple authors contributing content, so there’s a need to use multiple authors by default across the entire site. For this scenario, Blowfish allows users to extend the author list using the multi-author feature.

To maintain backward compatibility, this feature only allows defining additional authors and does not modify previously added authors through configuration files in any way.

Creating New Authors

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The first step in creating new authors is to set up a ./data/authors folder. Then, you can simply add new author json files inside it. The file name is the key you need to specify when referencing that author in articles.

For example, create a nunocoracao.json file in the ./data/authors folder. The file content example is as follows. name, image, bio, and social are the 4 parameters currently supported by author files, similar to the default author configuration in your languages.[language-code].toml configuration file.

Note: The key in social parameters will automatically get the theme’s icon, though you can also set any icon in the assets/icons folder.

{
    "name": "Nuno Coração",
    "image" : "img/nuno_avatar.jpg",
    "bio": "Theme Creator",
    "social": [
        { "linkedin": "https://linkedin.com/in/nunocoracao" },
        { "twitter": "https://twitter.com/nunocoracao" },
        { "instagram": "https://instagram.com/nunocoracao" },
        { "medium": "https://medium.com/@nunocoracao" },
        { "github": "https://github.com/nunocoracao" },
        { "goodreads": "http://goodreads.com/nunocoracao" },
        { "keybase": "https://keybase.io/nunocoracao" },
        { "reddit": "https://reddit.com/user/nunoheart" }
    ]
}

Referencing Authors in Articles

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Now that you’ve created new authors, the next step is to reference them in articles. In the example below, we use the author key created earlier to reference it.

Blowfish will use the data from the additional author’s corresponding json file to help render this author in the article. This feature does not change the default author of the entire site configuration, so you can control them separately. Using the showAuthor parameter, you can configure whether to display the default author, which is suitable for single-author blogs. The authors parameter in the front matter allows you to define additional authors for articles, and these authors will be independent of the default author across the entire site.

---
title: "Multi-Author"
date: 2020-08-10
draft: false
description: "Set up multiple authors for your articles."
slug: "multi-author"
tags: ["authors", "config", "docs"]
showAuthor: true
authors:
  - "nunocoracao"
showAuthorsBadges: false 
---

The example above, like this current page, will display both the default author and the new author. You can scroll through this page to see the actual effect.

Creating Author Taxonomy

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If you want to get lists of articles for each of your authors, you can configure the authors taxonomy, which opens up some more interesting configurations. This is an optional step in the multi-author mode process.

The first step is to configure the authors taxonomy in the config.toml file as shown below. Although tag and category are defined by Hugo by default, once you add a specific taxonomy, you need to explicitly add tag and category, otherwise based on Hugo’s file loading order, the site will not process tag and category.

[taxonomies]
  tag = "tags"
  category = "categories"
  author = "authors"

This way, you’ll have a page with a list of all authors, and each author will display a list of articles they’ve contributed to. If you want to display authors as badges in each article, there are two ways: add the article.showAuthorsBadges parameter in the global configuration file or configure the showAuthorsBadges parameter in each article’s front matter.

Finally, you can add more detailed content to each author page to display bios, links, or any other information that suits your needs. To achieve this, you need to add a folder named with the author’s key in the ./content/authors folder and add an _index.md file in that folder. For the example above, we would get a ./content/authors/nunocoracao/_index.md file. In this file, you can add the author’s actual name and their personal information page. The authors in this documentation site are configured this way, and you can see the actual effect in the documentation site.

---
title: "Nuno Coração"
---

Nuno's awesome dummy bio.

Example

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The example below demonstrates how to disable the site’s default author and add multiple authors to articles.