Choose Authors From Registered Users

July 29, 2008

php / programming

I’ve made my first, hopefully useful for public consumption, plugin for WordPress. I’ve made a few other plugins, but none of them seemed to be really useful or customizable to benefit others.

About this plugin

This plugin uses the same data as the WordPress function wp_list_authors();. This function lists all of the authors that have posts associated with their accounts. See the Codex for more information about this function.

Note that you cannot use this function outside the WordPress Loop. There is another plugin that creates a list of authors outside the loop, and it works very well for this purpose.

My plugin, which is a widget that can be used in any widgetized theme, allows you to pick users and list them by inserting the widget into your theme. If you have users with posts who should not be listed, simply do not check their names.

If there is interest, I’ll expand this so that it can be used inside the Loop as well, but it seems to me that it is most practical for sidebars.

Why make this plugin?

This plugin is not an attempt to compete with any of the methods listed above, although certainly it does have some of the same functionality and could easily be expanded to have all of the same functionality. Its difference is that it allows for users with posts to be excluded from the list. There are a couple of situations where this could be useful.

Download

Without further ado, feel free to download and try out this plugin.

Plugin:
Choose Authors From Registered Users (maybe it needs a better name).
Version:
0.5
Download
wp-chooseauthors.zip