I am using iJoomla magazine for an online version of a twice monthly 12 page newspaper.
Each issue has approximately 20 articles in it.
Half of those are from regular contributors but some are from people who maybe only write a couple of articles a year, some only one off's.
Pepole want to know who the authors are and having a biog is extra interest.
As things stand, though, I have to give each one of those authors a login to my Joomla site in order to use this function.
My feeling is that the authors functionality should allow the creation of authors and biography without requiring email etc.

Merav,

Could one of you developers take a moment and walk us thru that author/user integration? It's very confusing how the tables are linked, and I'm getting all sorts of odd errors as various editors tweak content either using the content manager or the magazine module.

Specifically, I'm having trouble understanding how a given article is associated with a jos_user entry -- while at the same time having an entry in the jos_magazine_users table. As far as I can tell, you're using the created_by_alias (text field) in the jos_content table to make the link, but that's pretty tenuous as it can be edited (inadvertently) in the content manager. Example: a well-meaning sub-editor goes in and adds a title in the alias field, so now the alias reads "Bob Smith, MD" -- and hey, presto, the association back to the magazine has been severed.

It's also not clear why the created_by field itself isn't simply used -- if you insist that a magazine author has an entry in the jos_users table, then why not simply use that ID directly? But again, I'm having a hard time following the logic, so it would be very helpful if you could do a quick 101 of the schema and thoughts behind the structure.