Skip to content
This documentation is a live feature demo. See the feature guide.
Documentation
Upgrade Notes
Move author information to CITATION.cff

Move author information to CITATION.cff

Who is affected

Lessons using the lesson/authors shortcode to display contributors on the homepage. Lessons that do not display this table do not need to add a citation file for this feature.

What changes

Starting with v0.6.0, lesson/authors reads only the root-level CITATION.cff. Support for AUTHORS was removed without a transition period. If the citation file is missing or empty, the table disappears even though the Hugo build can pass. If both files exist, the table may change because it now uses the citation authors.

What to do

  1. Transfer or reconcile all intended contributors from AUTHORS into the authors list in CITATION.cff. Preserve existing citation metadata and authors.
  2. Use given-names and family-names for people, name for organisations, and alias for GitHub handles. Put ORCID URLs in orcid, not GitHub handles.
  3. After checking the result, remove AUTHORS if nothing else in the repository needs it. The updater never deletes or converts contributor information automatically.

A minimal example (replace the title and author with the lesson’s actual information):

cff-version: 1.2.0
message: "Please cite this lesson using the metadata in this file."
title: "Example lesson"
authors:
  - given-names: Ada
    family-names: Lovelace
    alias: example-handle

See the author metadata documentation for name particles, suffixes, organisation names, and ORCID links.

How to verify

Validate the file with cffconvert --validate or the managed Validate CITATION.cff workflow. Build the lesson, then inspect the homepage: every intended contributor should be present, with the correct GitHub and ORCID links. A passing Hugo build does not establish that the contributor list is complete.