In the WordPress world, there are a lot of plugins. No really. As I write this, there are more than 36,000 free plugins available on WordPress.org. So generally speaking, almost anything you want to do with your WordPress site, you can find a plugin to help. They're not always good, but often they are, and hey, they're free!

I've never had a reason to submit a plugin I wrote — the space is very crowded, and a lot of needs are filled. I have a few plugins on Github, but they've been for demonstration purposes mostly. But I did recently run into an issue with a site, and after writing some code to solve it, I broke it out into a new, straightforward but useful plugin, Better Author Metabox.

What does this oh-so-catchy-named plugin do? It lets you make more users available in the Authors metabox that Administrators and Editors on the edit screen of any post (and remember: in WordPress, almost everything is a post). So content admins can assign content to more users than the ones WordPress recognizes as Authors. This came up for me on a site I've been working on where users were allowed to submit and edit their own content, but not the built-in Post type (really anything but one custom post type). This set of restrictions made them not appear in the Author metabox even for the content type to which they had privileges. With this plugin, they show up again.

The only plugin I've seen that might fill a need like this so far is Authors Autocomplete Meta Box. I thought there was room for another solution to the problem that's simpler, looks just like WordPress core, and worked out of the box with custom post types and user roles. Try either or both!

The next step is going to be looking at related issues in WordPress core (especially this one) and see if there's something I can help with. One step at a time.

Update: Just found out in the Advanced WordPress Facebook group that there's another one: Enhanced Author Dropdown. This one is very similar, with more granular, per-content-type configuration, and it uses jQuery select2 for its user interface. I still like the simplicity of mine, but it's another option to consider, and definitely serves the same purpose.