Recently in Authors Category

This article was first published at Movable Tweak.

This little snip of code will dump out a list of all the users and their email addresses on your install in a comma-delimited format that you can easily import into your email client. It’s particularly useful on larger installs:

<mt:Authors include_blogs="all">
    <mt:IfNonEmpty tag="AuthorEmail">
        <mt:IfNonEmpty tag="AuthorDisplayName">"<mt:AuthorDisplayName />" </mt:IfNonEmpty>
        &lt;<mt:AuthorEmail />&gt;,
    </mt:IfNonEmpty>
</mt:Authors>

And the Authors tag allows for all sorts of cool filtering attributes so you can get at any group of authors in the system, ordered however you like:

• display_name: Specifies a particular author to select.
• lastn: Limits the selection of authors to the specified number.
• sortby: Supported values: displayname, name, created_on.
• sort_order: Supported values: ascend, descend.
• roles: comma separated list of values. eg “Author, Commenter”
• need_entry: 1 | 0 (default is 1)
• status: Supported values: enabled, disabled. Default is enabled.

Note: Some people have asked about creating an email list of all the commenters on the system, and it’s very simple. The code stays the same, but you just need to specify roles=”Commenter” and need_entry=”0” (since most commenters won’t have written an entry). Here’s the code to do it:

 <mt:Authors include_blogs="all" roles="Commenter" need_entry="0" sort_by="display_name"><mt:IfNonEmpty tag="AuthorEmail"><mt:IfNonEmpty tag="AuthorDisplayName">"<mt:AuthorDisplayName />" </mt:IfNonEmpty>&lt;<mt:AuthorEmail />&gt;, </mt:IfNonEmpty>
 </mt:Authors>

Notice the code is much more compressed than the code given previously. If you tried the previous code, you probably noticed that the spacing is crazy because of all the hard returns and spaces we have in there. This second set of code I posted will give you a highly compact list of email addresses than can literally be copied and pasted into an email client.

Just make sure you use this for good, not evil.

As communities grow, so does the need to showcase your authors. Having a hefty community of authors is a great thing (content producers FTW!) but everyone wants their fifteen minutes. This handy little tip can help make sure everyone gets their fair share of the limelight.

A couple of things to note first: Make sure that you’ve got author archives set up. You can hack this to work with author profiles, but that’s not the scope of this tutorial. Also, this tutorial assumes that your server is parsing whatever page this is on as PHP. As a rule of thumb, if your file extension is .html, this probably won’t work; if you’re file extension is .php, you should be fine.

<?php
    $displayed_authors = array(); // Will hold indexes from $authors for authors already displayed
    $show = 25; // How many authors should we show?

    <mt:Authors>
        $authors[<mt:AuthorId />] = '<li><a href="<mt:EntryLink archive_type="Author" />"><mt:EntryAuthorDisplayName encode_php='1' /></a></li>';
    </mt:Authors>

    for ($i=1; $i <= $show; $i++) {
        $rn = array_rand($authors); 
        // Loops until it finds an author not displayed
        while(in_array($rn, $displayed_authors)) {
            $rn = array_rand($authors);
        }
        array_push($displayed_authors, $rn);
        echo $authors[$rn];
    }
?>

First, we set up an array where we’ll store all the authors that have already been displayed. More on that in a minute. Then we define how many authors we want to show with this block.