Custom Author Model Guide

By default the authors of a story is a many to many field using auth.User as the model. However you can also specify your own custom author model to be used. There are some things you will need to know about change the author model.

1. The initial migration using South was changed to allow for this custom many to many field be possible.

2. If your intent is to use a custom model, but have yet to defined this model, your inital migration uses auth.User as the authors many to many model. Later, when your custom author model is created, you will have to determine your self if the database table that was created needs to be changed as well.

This is usually the case if your custom model is named anything other the User. For example, the table name created using auth.User would be stories_storyauthor with 2 fields user_id and story_id. While story_id is obvious, user_id is the field that may change depending on the model name. The example app that is part of stories defines a authors model named BasicAuthor. The table name is still stories_storyauthor, however, the columnes it needs are basicauthor_id and story_id.

The initial South migration, takes this in account and will supply the name of the custom field for you. However if you changed the authors many to many model after the migration, you will need to determine the new column names and manually adjust them as needed.