How to Move the Author Metabox into the “Publish” metabox?

About a year ago I remember seeing a plugin or some code which allowed you to add an author dropdown menu to the post “publishing” metabox instead of it being on its own.

I can’t seem to find this code anymore and was wondering if anyone knows how to easily do this?

In an ideal situation I would like to essentially add an additional row under the “Visibility:” row within the Publish metabox stating “Author:” along with the current authors name and an edit link after the name. Upon clicking on the edit link a drop down would show up with the same information as is available in author metabox.

In any case, I would greatly appreciate to know how this can be done.

I somewhat suck with admin stuff so test this carefully. I had some issues with users not coming up in dropdown, but it fails with default meta box as well – probably because of my messed up test stack.

add_action( 'admin_menu', 'remove_author_box' );
add_action( 'post_submitbox_misc_actions', 'author_in_publish' );

function remove_author_box() {

    remove_meta_box( 'authordiv', 'post', 'normal' );
}

function author_in_publish() {

    global $post_ID;

    $post = get_post( $post_ID );
    echo '<div class="misc-pub-section">Author: ';
    post_author_meta_box( $post );
    echo '</div>';
}