rjbaniel
commented
9 years ago note: Just writing this here for my own future reference. If you're curious about the technical aspects feel free to ask, but don't worry about it.
I think the way to go here is to keep one box for "Primary Author", which will be the one we'll sort on, and then another box for "Other Author(s)", which starts out with one entry but lets the user add ad many as they want. We'll store the two separately - "primary author" will be stored the same way we're storing the author now, but "secondary authors" will be stored in a separate array of arrays (one array for each additional author with first name + middile initial & last name).
On the front end, we'll print out a list of authors all in one column, but make sure to put the "primary author" first, so that it's the one that TableSorter looks to for sorting. It should be possible to print out the secondary authors in alphabetical order by last name, which will be help prevent arbitrary orders in cases where documents have the same primary author but different secondary authors are.
Find a way to list multiple authors for one article.