Top Authors

Top authors allows yoy to list your top authors with plenty of options. You can set the following in each widget:

• Widget title
• Roles to exclude
• Post types to include
• Authors to show
• 4 Preset display templates
• Custom display template that allows you to create a completely custom structure and modify the output before and after the list.
• Archive (category/tag/taxonomy) specific author lists

For a more detailed description of how you can set up custom author lists take a look at the other notes section. The plugin also has some developer friendly features, take a look at the other notes section for more.

Thanks

• Seb Van Dijk for donating this plugin to me for free, I owe you one 🙂
• Font Awesome for the plugin icon

Usage

Most of the options for the plugin are self explanatory, I thought I’d highlight the archive specific authors and the display template.

If Archive specific authors is checked the plugin will handle authors differently on category, tag and taxonomy archive pages. It will narrow the posts down to only those in the given archive. Practically this means the following:

Say John wrote 10 posts on the website and Jill wrote 5. On normal pages John would be listed first, Jull would be listed second. However, John wrote 3 posts in the “Food” category while Jill wrote 4. On the archive page for the “Food” category – if Archive specific authors is checked – Jill will be shown first with 4 posts and John second with 3.

When you select “Custom Structure” as the preset display you should see three new fields: Display Template, Before List and After List. These fields can be used to control the HTML display of your authors. To make sure you can use the data retireved by the widget I’ve added placeholders which will be replaced by real data:

• %posts_url%: The URL to the user’s post archive page