Planning for collaborative publication with undergrads

I’m a senior humanities/social sciences grad student working with a number of undergrads on a collaborative project this semester. These undergrads have a set of skills that I don’t, and so we’ve been, essentially, applying their skills to make/improve a tool that’s useful for the kind of research that I do. They’re participating in this project through a research-for-credit course at my university.

I’ve gone into this project [a] wanting to be able to improve the tool for my work, but also [b] because I feel very strongly that the work that we’re (really, they’re) doing on the tool is publishable – I’ve seen papers about tools similar to ours, I know what journals I’d want to submit to, and so on. I’d really like to get our work to a place that it’s publishable, which means that I need to have some conversations with the students about what that could look like/what publishing and coauthorship would entail for them. (I told them at the beginning of the semester that there was a chance that the work we were doing could evolve into a coauthored publication, but I haven’t revisited it since then.)

My field doesn’t involve a ton of coauthorships, though, so I’m kind of figuring this out as I go. For anyone with more experience collaborating with undergrads, I have a few questions:

• Any tips on/resources for talking through with undergrads what the publication process looks like? I imagine I’ll want to talk through the whole process and what it’ll look like (and how slow it might be).
• Pursuing publication will involve ongoing work on the project/paper/etc. in the future, and I’m not sure if the undergrads will all want to participate in that (especially since I’m not sure if they’ll be able to participate in the research-for-credit course again). Any tips on deciding what contributions “count” for authorship? (I’ve had a bad experience in the past with an undergrad poster coauthor who dropped off and never responded to requests to look over our poster, which was kind of frustrating.)
• Authorship order also seems like a mess. I could imagine [ pure alphabetical order ], [ me + alphabetical undergrads ] , some tiered system based on contributions, or various other options. This could presumably be settled a bit later, but any tips on choosing an order when the time comes?