Learning the World

After talking with a faculty member and brainstorming how classes might use WordPress MU, one of the must-have tools we’ve decided we need is an author list. While we anticipate that we’ll have a number of one-person blogs if/when WordPress Mu is in production, there will also be goodly amount of multi-author blogs for classes, student organizations, etc.

We identified two needs:

• Hyperlink an author’s name to a page with all of their posts on the site.
• Include a widget listing all of the authors (with links to their individual posts)

After doing some research this morning, I’ve come up with a few solutions.

1. Linking to author names & listing authors through WP functions: The “Author Templates” page of the WordPress Codex lists a number of useful functions that can be used as part of the Loop to link to individual author pages as well as displaying post counts and author lists. 
   • The specific function is “the_author_posts_link()”, and it inserts the author’s name with a hyperlink to his/her “author” page, which lists everything they’ve written.
   • You can also use “wp_list_authors()” to list all the authors associated with the blog.
   • These options require you to modify the theme’s template file(s). 
2. Listing Authors with the Authors Widget: “Authors Widget” allows you to add a sidebar widget that lists all of the authors associated with the blog with links to their individual author pages (there’s also an optional link for their RSS feeds).

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