md_news_author for TYPO3

md_news_author gives editors a face and search engines a schema

GeorgRinger/news is the de facto standard extension for editorial systems in TYPO3, but it only knows a simple author text field. For news sites with multiple authors that is not enough: anyone who runs a serious magazine needs author profile pages, structured biographies and Schema.org/Person markup for E-E-A-T. This is exactly the gap that md_news_author by mediadreams (Christoph Daecke) fills, and that is why the extension ends up in the composer.json of many mid-sized TYPO3 editorial projects. Since Google extended E-A-T to E-E-A-T with experience in 2022 and explicitly recommends bylines that lead to an author page, the extension is no longer just a comfort feature but an SEO factor for any newsroom with more than three authors.

Typical use cases are online magazines, specialist publishers and university newsrooms

Specialist publishers are the classic audience. A legal publisher with 40 authors wants a dedicated detail page per author with picture, short biography, areas of expertise, LinkedIn profile and a list of all articles by that author, for SEO reasons and because Google rewards E-E-A-T. md_news_author delivers all of this from a single record. In addition, the extension allows filtering authors by area of expertise, so that editors can find the right experts directly while researching topics.

University newsrooms use the extension to attribute press releases from the communications office to the actual researchers. The press release appears under the name of the respective chair holder, links to their institute page and is signalled to Google via Person schema. For the visibility of the researchers this is more than cosmetic. We have implemented md_news_author, for example, at a medical research institute with 18 research groups, where every press release is attributed to the participating group and its members. The extension links news content with researcher profiles and thereby creates a structured foundation for academic reputation on the web.

A third scenario is corporate blogs and thought leadership formats in which executives appear as authors. The extension cleanly separates FE users (login) from authors (profile), so that biographies can also be maintained for guest authors without a TYPO3 account. For corporate newsrooms with a ghostwriter setup, this separation is decisive: the communications editor writes the text but publishes it under the name of the executive, without that executive needing a backend login.

Technical architecture extends GeorgRinger/news via TCA overrides

md_news_author is a pure addition to ext:news. It brings two plugins of its own for the author list and the author profile and registers the “news_author” field via TCA override as a relation to a new table tx_mdnewsauthor_domain_model_newsauthor. Every author is a standalone record with first name, last name, title, slug, biography, image, LinkedIn, X, email and phone. The relation is MM-typed, so an article can have several authors and conversely an author can be involved in any number of articles.

Integration with Fluid templates runs through the author’s properties and one ViewHelper for the name: {md:ShowAuthorName(author: author)}, {author.position}, {author.image} and {author.www}. For list and detail views, the extension ships ready-made partials that can be overridden via the TypoScript package system. The slug is automatically generated from first and last name and is editable. Routing for author detail pages runs through an enhancer pattern in the site config that enables URLs such as /author/jane-doe/ without any additional page structure.

Schema.org/Person markup ships as microdata in the extension’s detail template and can be linked with the news article schema in custom templates. This helps Google recognise the author and attribute them across multiple articles. The markup can be checked with the Schema Markup Validator and covers the most important Person attributes: name, jobTitle, worksFor, description, telephone, email and url.

Common problems involve storage pages and slug collisions

The classic stumbling block is the storage page configuration. md_news_author expects the author records to live on a dedicated sysfolder that is registered in the extension’s plugins or in its TypoScript constant storagePid. If the entry is missing, the plugin shows no authors and editors are puzzled. On setup we place the sysfolder under /Configuration/News authors and reference it in the plugin flexform. In multi-site installations, the sysfolder has to be maintained per site, so that authors remain attributed to a specific brand.

A second common issue are slug collisions with other tables. If md_news_author runs alongside ext:sf_register or a custom person model, both often share the same URL structure. We recommend deliberately setting the routing prefix to /author/ and registering the slug generation in the site config YAML. Alternatively, the routing enhancer can be configured per language, which is especially important in multilingual installations with different path prefixes (“/author/” EN, “/autor/” DE).

Thirdly, images require a defined image size. md_news_author delivers the FAL reference, but the cropping variants have to be maintained via a TCA override (overrideChildTca) for the image field of the table tx_mdnewsauthor_domain_model_newsauthor. Without that, the cropping ViewHelper in the detail template falls back to the unedited original image. We recommend defining at least three cropping variants (square, portrait, landscape) and delivering them responsively in the Fluid template.

Migration to current TYPO3 versions

md_news_author is available as a stable release for TYPO3 v11 to v14; the current version 9.0.0 supports TYPO3 13.4 and 14. On the jump to v12, custom Fluid templates and the namespace ({namespace md=Mediadreams\MdNewsAuthor\ViewHelpers}) stay unchanged; templates last had to be adapted with version 6.0.0 for TYPO3 v11. Anyone coming from an old 2.x version should also review the TCA overrides, because fields such as LinkedIn and Xing have been added since then. The biography field and the social media links in particular gained additional properties in newer versions that would be ignored in old templates.

In ongoing projects, Gosign typically migrates md_news_author in the same step as the news core upgrade and the Schema.org markup. This keeps the article page consistent during the transition, and the Person markup is lifted to the current Schema.org specification at the same time. In the same step, we check whether the author profiles contain a complete sameAs list with verified social media accounts, because Google uses that link for knowledge graph matching.