Enhancements: Add 'designer' user role, Collaborator groups/teams, display multiple contributor types and co-authors, contributor heirarchy on posts/pages

[amykamala]

With the introduction of notes in WP 6.9 I believe the ability to add multiple authors ala #7650 is a feature request that should be reconsidered. (But don't close this yet, it's not an exact duplicate)

Co-authors are common for publications and it probably would not be that difficult to add the proper relationships/taxonomies for the basic architecture of displaying co-authors (but I hope I don't eat my words here).

In addition to being able to list multiple authors / co-authors on posts:

• Core could facilitate author groups (teams) where users can be added to a group/team and then the group name is the author, and when you hover over or click on the group name it displays the list of authors/contributors belonging to that group. The groups could also have different roles within them like author, editor, designer etc.

• Posts themselves could have more than one contributor-type field. Not only co-authors but other roles as well i.e. author, co-author, collaborator, editor, designer, etc. Of course there is currently no 'designer' user role in Core so that would have to be added.

• Additionally there could be author hierarchies where one user or user group is highlighted as the main author and then the collaborators etc are listed as support or collaborators

• Groups/teams listed as author could come with the option to select who from the group/team contributed and display those names as collaborators rather than the entire group. So an option in the sidebar to list the entire group or select specific individuals.

• Names of whomever wrote block notes could be pulled and added as collaborators automatically (with a toggle), as well as the ability to add them manually similarly to how we add categories.

[johnbillion]

I'd like to see support for multiple authors too but it's a surprisingly complex consideration. I built ​the Authorship plugin to facilitate a performant way of applying multiple authors to a post while correctly retaining their capabilities with regard to the post. Its design decisions are documented in the repo and its issues.

The underlying relationship between a post and an author is done via a taxonomy. This results in efficient author queries and facilitates different "types" of author -- author, co-author, collaborator -- as you mentioned. The main problem is retaining support for the post_author field and deciding exactly what that represents.

I've not come across a multi-author solution that places users into groups and then sets that group (which is actually also a row in the users table) as the post author, but it could have potential and could make back-compat with post_author easier.