So this seemed really easy, but apparently it was not, or I guess I would not be writing about it here.  Ok, here is the deal, I wanted a full list of all the authors on one particular blog.  I wanted them all on one page and listed out with links to their blog posts.  I wanted them all to have images next to their names. The standard way to do this seems to be to list out all the user names on your blog, since hey, no harm here, we are only running one blog.

Enter WPMU.  We are not running just one blog, we are running hundreds and have thousands of users.  Listing out all the users via a SQL query would be a huge list, not to mention not at all representative of who is an author on this particular blog.  I did some looking around on the wordpress codex and found a couple of functions that I thought could be helpful.  The first one that came up was wp_list_authors.  This function just lists out all the authors for a particular blog – particularly helpful for WPMU sites.

Now the problem with wp_list_authors is that it just outputs the list of authors as a chunk of links, so you have to chop it up somehow since its not in the loop – yeah, we are doing all this outside of the loop.  The second issue is that this is all that it puts out – links to the author archive page.  No ids, no emails, nothing – its not like the_author_meta which gives you all kinds of nice stuff.

Ok, but at least we have something we can hack up, so I started in on it and this is what I came up with.

<?php
$allAuthorNames = explode(',',wp_list_authors('style=0&amp;show_fullname=1&amp;hide_empty=0&amp;echo=0'));
foreach ( $allAuthorNames as $oneAuthorName ) { ?>
  <li>
  <?php
  $oneAuthorArray = explode(" ",$oneAuthorName);
  if (count($oneAuthorArray) > 1) {
    $oneAuthorLink = explode("/",$oneAuthorArray[2]);
    end($oneAuthorLink);
    $userData = get_userdatabylogin(prev($oneAuthorLink));
  } else {
    $userData = array("user_email" => "None");
  }
echo get_avatar($userData->user_email,$size='96',$default='');
?>
<?php echo ($oneAuthorName); ?>
</li>
<?php } ?>

Pardon my PHP, it sucks, but in any case it gets it done here at least.

Notice the nice function that gets it done? Oddly, there is not much documentation to the get_userdatabylogin function, but its a nice one.  Tie together wp_list_authors with get_userdatabylogin and you can get even more info than you can get from the_author_meta.

Now this code is by no means the finished product, but it does work and it is a nice way to get a full list of everything that the author has in their profile in the DB. At the moment I just used it to get the email address of the author I was iterating over, but the function dumps out the entire user DB row object. A bit dangerous I suspect, but useful.

Happy coding,  hope this saves you a bit of time.

More pain