Feature request: Authorship assignment

[ginestra]

At the moment is not possible to reassign the authorship of a post within Wagtail's dashboard. The only way to do it is to go into the database directly and changed the owner. It would be a useful feature to have, considering some might have web editors that need to assign articles to contributors and such. Thanks

[gasman]

Have now merged #3581, which makes it possible to add the 'page owner' field to the displayed panels on a per-page-type basis. This now raises the question of whether to make it available by default: it probably makes sense to do that (especially since we plan to do the same for the "first published at" field: #3498), but if we do, we need to ensure that the resulting form widget is not just a dropdown of all users on the system (since this could include front-end users too, and there could be thousands of them). Logically, it should probably be a selector of all users who have add or edit permission over the current page or one of its ancestors.

[gasman]

Another consideration we'll need to account for if we add this (or any other field) to the default panels list of Page - we'll need to make sure that any existing apps (e.g. Puput) that explicitly add the field by doing:

settings_panels = Page.settings_panels = [
    FieldPanel('owner')
]

continue to work, and don't get tripped up by the duplicate field. (I guess we need to check for duplicates, and if any are found, output a warning and ignore the second one...)

[marctc]

Good point @gasman! I'll think about it.

[tmsndrs]

@ginestra could you expand on your use-case?

I think it's sensible to assume that the 'page owner' is not the same as the page author from the websites users perspective.

I presume you're talking about your editorial workflow. Could you explain what you're trying to achieve in a little more detail please?

[ginestra]

Hi @tmsndrs,

Thanks for following up on this. The use case has to do with authors changing and the need to reassign authorship of their content to others, or admins publishing on behalf of others and not being able to re-assign when appropriate. Also and maybe more importantly: when an import happens, whoever does the import is recorder as the page owner which is usually not the case for all the pages. I hope this makes sense. Thanks

[SalahAdDin]

@gasman, I wasn't knowing about these feature.

[thibaudcolas]

As of #11359, we now have a filter for page owners, so I believe "now" will be a good time to decide whether it makes sense to allow re-assigning ownership.