User + author in one model or not

Rails
1

Hi everybody,

I am building some kind of social networking web. I have implemented
user registration and now I would like to add another type of
registration (authors). I dont know whether to keep the registration
simple and add just a checkbox (user and author) and add a new column
(user_type) into the existing user table or build a new model
Author to manage authors.

Thanks for your thoughts.
Cheers
Petr

2

Why does it need to be a type? What makes an author so different to
make it different from a common user?

Maurício Linhares
http://alinhavado.wordpress.com/ (pt-br) | http://blog.codevader.com/
(en)

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:37 AM, Petr B.

3

I was planning to create subdomain for each author, so I want to
seperate them from the normal users.

Maurício Linhares wrote:

Why does it need to be a type? What makes an author so different to
make it different from a common user?

4

Petr B. wrote:

I was planning to create subdomain for each author, so I want to
seperate them from the normal users.

Maurício Linhares wrote:

Why does it need to be a type? What makes an author so different to
make it different from a common user?

You could use a type column, and single table inheritance, but I suggest
creating a separate Author model with its own authors table, and have a
user_id in that table. This way, an Author belongs_to a User. All
author-specific data goes in the authors table, and you can reuse all of
your authentication with the User model.

Alternatively, users could have an author_id, if that makes more sense.