Hi ag1266,

You are right. In the current Joomla 2.5 version is a bug causing the alias to be malformed. This will be fixed in the next release. In the meantime you can edit the file:
\administrator\components\com_focontentuploader\
helpers\helper.php

At line 86 you will find the slugify function. Replace the complete function with the following code:

function slugify($string){

    $string = preg_replace('~[^\\pL\d]+~u', '-', trim($string));

    if (function_exists('iconv')) {

        $string = iconv('utf-8', 'us-ascii//TRANSLIT', $string);

    }

    $string = strtolower($string);

    $string = preg_replace('~[^-\w]+~', '', $string);



    return $string;

}

You can get in contact with me by dropping a mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
I'm not sure why the author alias stopped working for you. I just tried it using a column reference with and without curly brackets and both works. If you like you can send me a superadmin login to your site and I will check it out.

Kind regards,
Pete