Lookup author in site.data.authors

[pathawks]

Where will the plugin try to find a post author's Twitter username?

1. site.data.authors[post.author].twitter
2. site.data.authors[post.author].name
3. post.author.twitter
4. post.author.name
5. post.author
6. site.data.authors[site.author].twitter
7. site.data.authors[site.author].name
8. site.author.twitter
9. site.author.name
10. site.author

Ugh. I don't even begin to know how to document this. It is too bad that there isn't just one standard convention for all of this.
#31

[benbalter]

Looking through things, do we ever actually use seo_author_name? It looks like the only author information that's used is for the Twitter Card, which requires a twitter username, not a human-readable name. That should let us cut things in half.

We may be able to simplify things a bit further:

1. Set seo_author to page.author or if that doesn't exist site.author
2. If seo_author.twitter exists (it's an object), use that
3. If site.authors[seo_author].twitter exists, use that
4. seo_author

Does that account for every possible permutation?

[pathawks]

Looking through things, do we ever actually use seo_author_name?

Not currently, but I would like to.

Honestly, it kind of feels like magic to assume that the author name will also just happen to match that user's Twitter username. Here is how I would really like to do things (in Ruby/pseudocode):

author = {}

if post.author.is_a? Hash
  author = post.author

elsif site.data.authors[post.author].is_a? Hash
  author = site.data.authors[post.author]

elsif post.author.is_a? String
  author = { 'name' : post.author }

elsif site.author.is_a? Hash
  author = site.data.authors[post.author]

elsif site.author.is_a? String
  author = { 'name' : site.author.to_s }

end

Then, we can use author.name or author.twitter or author.url or whatever anywhere we want.

As far as I know, Liquid has no way to check the type of an object or create hashes, so I'm not really sure of the best way to go about this...

[benbalter]

Yeah, looks like it's going to be a lot more sane in Ruby, and it's just string manipulation, so I don't think there's much security concern.

How about something like:

author = post.author || site.author # Default to post.author, fallback to site.author, both stings and objects
return author.twitter if author.twitter # The author is an object, use the Twitter property
return site.data.authors[author].twitter if site.data.authors[author].twitter # The author is a string, check for a matching key in the data 
author # The author is a string with no matching data, this is all we've got

That said, where would we use author.name within the plugin?