Does WordPress have Author Alias like Joomla

One feature that I love on Joomla, which I never see in other CMS/blog is the author alias feature. It allows you to type in the name of a post’s author if the author isn’t in the list of authors (members) on your site.

For example, on my site, I have a few members who act as editor. But we have content submitted by many people. At the moment, I need to make a member account for each of these people. A pain!

The custom user fields in many CMS/WordPress could be used, but it isn’t elegant IMHO. In my list of posts, I display who the author is, I suppose I could do something like…

Create a user called ‘submitted’
If the author of the post = “submitted” display the custom field that I have used to store the author alias

And for each post create a custom field and enter the author’s name.

Isn’t there a plugin to better handle my situation? ie Still be able to show who authored the content, but not require a user to register?

Thanks!