WordPress Snippet: List Authors/Contributors

We were playing around with Brian (@bkmacdaddy) today on a WordPress blog with a few over 50 authors, then bumped into an issue where we had to output a list of all contributors. It’s quite easy at first sight, and functions such as wp_list_authors are quite good at it, but not good enough.

The main issue was that the authors had to be paged and sorted by their names. Moreover, each entry had to contain the contributor’s avatar, Twitter profile, short biography and the website URL. And the other funny part is that we had to exclude the admin user and all users with no posts, which turned out to have quite a simple solution.

After a few hours struggling, we finally came to a solution that is quite interesting, and most importantly, seems to work. There may be a little drawback when retrieving the whole users list, and a direct query to the SQL database with a few JOINs and a LIMIT could have solved that, but it’s not the case if we have some caching plugin turned on. So, here’s the snippet:

// Use this to sort authors by display name
function sort_authors($a, $b)
{
	return strcmp($a['display_name'], $b['display_name']);
}

// Output a list of contributors
function contributors() {
	$authors = array();

	// Get all blog users
	$blogusers = get_users();
	foreach ($blogusers as $bloguser)
	{
		// Fetch
		$user = get_userdata($bloguser->user_id);
		$numposts = get_usernumposts($user->ID);

		// Skip if admin or has no posts
		if ($user->user_login == 'admin' || $numposts < 1) continue;
		$authors[] = (array) $user;
	}

	// Sort the authors by display name
	usort($authors, 'sort_authors');

	// Get the current page
	$paged = get_query_var('paged');
	if (!$paged) $paged = 1;

	// We'll return these at a later stage
	$current_page = $paged;
	$total_pages = ceil(count($authors) / 10);

	// Calculate the starting and ending points
	// Assuming we'll be showing 10 authors per page
	$start = ($paged - 1) * 10;
	$end = $paged * 10;
	if ($end > count($authors)) $end = count($authors);

	// Loop through the authors
	for ($i = $start; $i < $end; $i++)
	{
		$author = $authors[$i];

		// Gather data and meta
		$nicename = $author['user_nicename'];
		$display_name = $author['display_name'];
		$avatar = get_avatar($author['ID']);
		$author_profile_url = get_bloginfo('url') . '/author/' . $nicename . '/';
		$website = get_usermeta($author['ID'], 'user_url');
		$twitter = get_usermeta($author['ID'], 'twitter');
		$bio = $author['description'];

		// Hide if empty
		$twitter = strlen($twitter) > 0 ? 'Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/' . $twitter . '" target="_blank">@' . $twitter . '</a><br />' : '';
		$website = strlen($website) > 0 ? 'Website: <a href="' . $website . '" target="_blank">Visit</a><br />' : '';
		$bio = strlen($bio) > 0 ? 'Bio: ' . substr($bio, 0, 50) . '... <a href="' . $author_profile_url . '">Read more</a><br />' : '';

		// Output the list
		print <<<HTML
			<li>
				<a href="{$author_profile_url}">{$avatar}</a>
				<div>
					<a href="{$author_profile_url}">{$display_name}</a><br />
					{$bio}
					{$website}
					{$twitter}
					<a href="{$author_profile_url}">Visit {$display_name}'s Profile Page</a>
				</div>
			</li>
HTML;
	}

	// Return an array containing current and total pages
	// These values could be used to output pagination
	return array(
		'current_page' => $current_page,
		'total_pages' => $total_pages
	);
}

The snippet consists of two functions. The first function is simply a helper function that is passed to the usort function when we need to reorder the contributors in alphabetical order. A simple strcmp is used as the sorting algorithm.

The second function is quite complex. We use the get_users_of_blog function, which unfortunately is not described in the Codex. It returns all the users of the current blog (in our case, there’s only one blog). Looping through all the users, we eliminate the admin, and those who haven’t got any published posts, then form an array of authors. This array is then sorted, and finally, after some pagination tweaks and calculations, we output the list of contributors, depending on the current page (uses get_query_var).

After all that messy stuff, we return our two variables which will help build the pagination UI. And we’re done. Use this in your functions.php and call contributors() in a page template or something ;)

Cheers, and don’t forget to share this post!

Published 2 years ago with 28 comments tagged ,