rubhadubh

Thanks guys, that’s the kind of pointer I needed. I have come across post types, but wondered if that was the way folks were handling this sort of scenario.

I have a lot of code written to handle members, companies, shop items – that sort of thing – add, edit, delete, re-order items and so on. I wasn’t sure how to integrate any of that code, or whether to abandon it and try using inbuilt features.

I’ll have a play with custom post types, but is there a way to add a wp-admin menu item which would open an application page in the right pane, much like ‘Settings’? The app code would have to be outside the core so as not to be written over on wordpress upgrade, but is that possible?

Ok, a better solution…

Turns out that you can get the page id using $post->ID so I wrote a function get_page_author() and saved it in functions.php which takes the page id as a parameter and returns the post_author id from the wp_posts table, like so:

function get_page_author($pageid){
  global $wpdb;
  $authorid = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT post_author FROM wp_posts WHERE ID = $pageid AND post_status = 'publish' AND post_type = 'page'";);
  if($authorid > 0)
    return $authorid;
  else
    return false;
}

in my blogger.php file I can then use that to filter the posts, like so:

$authorid = get_page_author($post->ID);
if($authorid){
  query_posts("author=$authorid");
}

Once we have the authorid we can go get other details from the database with it – I guess there are pre-made functions, but I might stick to doing it my own way! I have spent more time trying to find my way around wordpress – I could have had the whole site built and signed off by now!!

Hope that helps you too?

Yes, in WP Admin there is a drop down labelled Page Author, where I can pick from a list of users I have assigned as Authors. It only showed up once there were Authors created.

You would *think* that we could access this somehow on a page but I’ve spent all day looking for it – arghhh. Thanks for your help asechrest.

There must be a function like get_page_details that returns an array of information about the current page, but I’m damned if I can find it. Anyone?

This seems harder than it should be! I don’t really understand the distinction between Pages and Posts. I would have thought that mixing page content and filtered posts was a fairly common requirement?

I’m looking into query_posts() and will report back. I guess once you have the author_name, or id, then grabbing other bio data should be easy enough.

So, I have a parent page called Blogs and for each registered Author I create a child page called after their name. The child page is given a page template called blogger.php (to avoid confusion with author.php which is used by posts). In blogger.php I call query_post(‘author_name=xxxxx’) and then loop through the resulting posts? Does that roughly right? Thanks.