How to associate string with individual use of taxonomy term

Question

I'm building a wordpress theme for a small news publication. Each post has one or more authors, for which I am using a custom taxonomy. Each author has a single title (such as Editor, Writer, etc.) in each post. I would prefer not to make a solution which involves setting a time range for titles, since titles may change frequently.

I am unsure how to implement this.

I was thinking of storing the title as part of the author term, but it's important that the user be able to see all posts the author has written, regardless of their title at the time.

I was also thinking of storing the titles as postmeta, but then there would be no way to tell which title was associated with which author.

I would use term meta but it looks like that would only allow one title per author, and it's important that if an author is a Writer, and later becomes an Editor, that their old posts still show that they were a Writer at the time.

Sorry if I'm using any terminology wrong; I'm slightly new to Wordpress development. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I could do?

Answer 1

I recommend using the Co-Authors plugin instead of building your own solution. That way, you use the existing WordPress user roles (Editor, Author, etc).

You'll then need to edit your theme's template to show multiple authors. The plugin author provides documentation on how to do this though.

Update - added more details based on comment below.

For example

You would edit your single.php template and replace the_author() template tag with coauthors().