As a popular CMS, Joomla can be used to serve various purpose sites, from simple news management to sophisticated e-commerce with CRM functionalities. Now, consider yourself as a smart publisher who instead of burning your skin chasing for a hot article about kitten’s birth, decides to automate the process and let user submit their favorite news and article to your site.

You choose Joomla because it’s simple and easy to manage. Later you pick JA Submit, a content submission component available for free download at http://www.joomlart.com/downloads/ cat/free_joomla_extensions/ja_submit_2.1.html and after installing, configuring the component and put the link at your site, you’re done. Really?

As a good man who appreciate intellectual property, you acknowledge an obligation to display article’s author on each contribution. You look at the form provided by JA Submit and find a field which points to author’s name. You feel at ease. Now you try to make sure it works. You submit an article about UFO landing on a very vast grass field and put your manish space name as the author. The submit button is clicked and then you try to read the article since you auto approve article submitted by non registered user.

Surprisingly, your name is not there. You do a recheck by going to the admin panel. Strangely, you find your name is not there. What’s wrong?

Actually, it’s something to deal with joomla core, not JA Submit. Basically, JA Submit works by inserting data to content tables which is later displayed by com_content. If you’re comfortable with editing php files, you can tweak com_content to set name alias as the top priority.

To do so, please follow these steps successively. After all’s done, make a page refresh and see if it shows the effect desired.

1. Go to components/com_content folder

2. Open content.html.php

3. Find this tag:

 function Author(... 

4. Change the function into

	/**
	* Writes Author name
	*/
	function Author( &$row, &$params ) {
		if ( ( $params->get( 'author' ) ) && ( $row->author != '' ) ) {
			?>
			<tr>
				<td width="70%" align="left" valign="top" colspan="2">
					<span class="small">
						<?php echo _WRITTEN_BY . ' '.( $row->created_by_alias ? $row->created_by_alias : $row->author ); ?>
					</span>
					  
				</td>
			</tr>
			<?php
		}
	}

It’s so simple and now you won’t be sued for copyright infringement.