authors-info

Author Info plugin

Take the guesswork out of tracking who created, edited, and published content(and when) across your collections and globals—automatically.

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Usage

🔹 Seamless Author Tracking – This plugin automatically captures and stores key authoring details, so you always know who created, modified, and published each document.
🔹 Enhanced Metadata – While Payload CMS tracks creation and modification dates, it doesn’t store publication dates—but this plugin does! Now, you’ll have a clear record of the most recent publish date for every entry.
🔹 Integrated Author Data – A new "Author Data" tab is added to the authoring interface, providing a centralized place for all user activity related to the document.

With this fully automated tracking system, you'll always have complete visibility into who did what and when—without any extra effort.

Install

Install the plugin using your node package manager, e.g:

pnpm add @shefing/authors-info

Setup

In the payload.config.ts add the following:

plugins: [
    ...plugins,
    addAuthorsFields({
      excludedCollections: [],//array of collections names to exclude
      excludedGlobals:[], // array of globals names to exclude
      usernameField: 'fullName', //name field to use from Users collection, 'user' by default
    }),

Roadmap

See the consolidated ROADMAP.md at the repo root and the live RoadMap issues for Authors Info.

P0

• Activity timeline tab reusing custom-version-view data (created → edited → published → reverted).
• Configurable display fields — choose which author attributes show in the tab and list columns.
• Surface in list views — opt-in column adapter for Updated By / Published By in any collection list.

P1

• Editor presence ("currently being edited by …") with stale-lock cleanup.
• Email author on publish hook (configurable template).

P2

• CSV / JSON export of activity for compliance.