I’m running into an ‘author’ name conflict that prevents me from seeing the value of the author field in the “Content” list view in Contentful’s web app. Let me explain…
I started by selecting the standard blog template and Contentful automatically created 2 content types:
Blog Post
Person
The Blog Post automatically came with a reference ‘Author’ field (field ID ‘author’) that points to the Person model. Now I understand that Contentful also keeps track of its own author and they assign it to whoever created the content. The Contentful author is the only one that can appear in the list view of the web app, which isn’t the same author as the “Author” reference field.
Here’s an example. The first entry in the left image shows “me” as the author because I’m the one who created the entry in Contentful. However, clicking on that entry reveals the real author (right image):
How can I get the real author to appear as one of the columns in the list?
Note that I didn’t chose the ‘author’ field name in the Blog Post model (although I find it appropriate for my domain). Contentful generated that field automatically when I selected their starting template.
The ‘author’ you see in the Web App as the ‘creator’ of the entry is a system field, different from the ‘Author’ reference field that you mentioned.
As I understood you would like to have the Contentful ‘author’ displayed in the list ‘Author’; I can tell you that is not an easy task. What you could try to do to achieve this, is to create a UI extension that maps your Contentful Users to ‘Person’ entries, and then populate it automatically in the reference field (since UI extensions use Management API, example: https://www.contentful.com/developers/docs/references/content-management-api/#/reference/entries/entry/get-a-single-entry/console )
However I feel this might be an overdoing. In the particular case, I think it would be better to define who are the public ‘Authors’ of your content, and choose them as linked entry directly.
Does this mean that there’s no simple way to list the ‘Author’ (reference field to the Person model) in the Blog Post list in Contentful’s web UI? Note that these models were set up like this by default by Contentful’s automatic model generator for your ‘Blog Post’ template.
Unfortunately there is no easy way. I’m aware that is the default ‘Blog Post’ template, but the system does not create any link between the user-author and the entry-author.
Just to confirm, there’s no way to get the user-author to appear in the blog post list? It looks like every other custom field can be select, just not the user-author.
I think that’s what you said, but wanted to confirm because it seems very strange that only this one field can’t be selected to appear in the blog post list.
Yes, that’s the list I’m referring to. The only Author it lists is the person who created the entry. There’s no way for me to list the author that’s referenced in the blog post.
Here’s what I mean. The Author (i.e. Aili) listed here is the person who created the entry:
If I click in to the first blog post circled in red above (“Setting up your Facebook business or recruitment page”), then I see the real author referenced in the blog post (i.e. Ryan):
There’s no way for me to list “Ryan” in the blog post list. How can I do that?
