Posted 4 months ago #
Are there any plans in the works to make this more useful? For example, having it return an array of workable data instead of a string? Alternatively, is there another function I can use to get all this data in an array?
I'm guessing there's a plug-in for that functionality, but really it should be a given since having just a list of authors isn't very versatile.
Thanks,
David
Posted 4 months ago #
I don't know if I'm a bit slow or what, but it looks to me like that page (which I read before) shows how to customize an individual author's page. What I want is to return a list of authors, along with their information, in an array (or lacking that, have a custom page for displaying a list of authors).
The page you linked to doesn't mention if/how to do that.
Thanks,
David
Posted 3 months ago #
And what is it you cannot do with this function?
Posted 3 months ago #
Well, both simple and advanced things.
Simple: Put my authors list into an HTML table.
Advanced: Pull author meta data along with username and number of posts and put them into a PHP array.
I mean, I'm starting to think that I'll have to find or write a plug-in for this. lol
Posted 3 months ago #
I ran into the same problem as you. It's kind of dumb the only easy function to get the authors in WordPress poops out HTML or simply a comma delimited list of authors without useful further data.
I had to create this function to get data to make an authors drop-down list for a blog with very special requirements. This just returns the users and takes the args 'exclude_admin', 'hide_empty'. It also adds the number of posts as the 'posts' field, since I needed to look it up anyway to exclude users with zero posts. Sorry if the PHP is wonky in some way, but I haven't done any for 3 years and had to jump into PHP again for this project (not my choice).
I agree it would've been nice if WordPress had model-only code for getting the authors. They don't really seem to have separated the model data from view. But then, it's a historical problem with PHP not creating boundaries or encouraging programmers to organize their code into mvc.
/**
* To get list of authors with posts field added
* which contains the number of posts for that author
* boolean arg 'exclude_admin', 'hide_empty'
*/
function get_authors($args = '') {
global $wpdb;
$defaults = array(
'exclude_admin' => true
);
$r = wp_parse_args( $args, $defaults );
extract($r, EXTR_SKIP);
$return = '';
$ex_adm = ($exclude_admin ? "user_login <> 'admin' " : ' 1 = 1');
$hi_emp = ($hide_empty ? "postnum.posts > 0 " : ' 1 = 1');
$query = <<<EOS
SELECT $wpdb->users.*,
COALESCE(postnum.posts,0) as posts FROM $wpdb->users
LEFT JOIN
(SELECT post_author, count(post_author) as posts
FROM $wpdb->posts
WHERE post_type = 'post'
GROUP BY post_author) as postnum
ON $wpdb->users.ID = postnum.post_author
WHERE $ex_adm AND $hi_emp
ORDER BY display_name;
EOS;
$authors = $wpdb->get_results($query);
return $authors;
}
}
Posted 3 months ago #
Example of usage:
$args = array('exclude_admin' => false, 'hide_empty' => false);
$authors = $this->get_authors( $args );I also just noticed in my code that I forgot to include a default for 'hide_empty', so it should be the following for defaults instead.
' $defaults = array(
'exclude_admin' => true,
'hide_empty' => false
);'
Posted 3 months ago #
er, I meant.
$defaults = array(
'exclude_admin' => true,
'hide_empty' => false
);
Posted 3 months ago #
Yeah, that's pretty much what I needed. I already went ahead and wrote it out myself. Code is similar.
Simple plug-in. Useful, too.
You must log in to post.
