srcoley

<p>This wigetized plugin shows the gravatar and info of the most recently active authors of your blog. The author with the most recent post will be displayed first, the author with the second latest will be displayed second, and so on.</p>
<p>Awesome Authors allows you to select ‘Sticky Authors.’ These authors will be displayed at the front of the list no matter how long ago their latest post was published. Conversely, you can select authors to be ‘Excluded Authors.’ These authors will never be displayed in the list no matter how many posts they have or how recently their last post was published. You can also set a minimum post requirement. If you set this to, let’s say 10, then only authors with 10 or more published posts will be displayed on the Author Bar. Some of the other options include gravatar display size, and how many authors overall to display.</p>


Awesome Authors

This wigetized plugin shows the gravatar and info of the most recently active authors of your blog.

danielpataki

<p>Top authors allows yoy to list your top authors with plenty of options. You can set the following in each widget:</p>
<ul>
<li>Widget title</li>
<li>Roles to exclude</li>
<li>Post types to include</li>
<li>Authors to show</li>
<li>4 Preset display templates</li>
<li>Custom display template that allows you to create a completely custom structure and modify the output before and after the list.</li>
<li>Archive (category/tag/taxonomy) specific author lists</li>
</ul>
<p>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.</p>
<h4>Thanks</h4>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/sebvandijk" rel="nofollow ugc">Seb Van Dijk</a> for donating this plugin to me for free, I owe you one 🙂</li>
<li><a href="http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/" rel="nofollow ugc">Font Awesome</a> for the plugin icon</li>
</ul>
<h4>Usage</h4>
<p>Most of the options for the plugin are self explanatory, I thought I’d highlight the archive specific authors and the display template.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<ul>
<li>%posts_url%: The URL to the user’s post archive page</li>
<li>%website_url%: The URL to the user’s website</li>
<li>%gravatar_SIZE%: The gravatar of the user at the given size. For example, to display a 50px Gravatar your would use %gravatar_50%</li>
<li>%firstname%: The user’s first name</li>
<li>%lastname%: The user’s last name</li>
<li>%displayname%: The user’s display name</li>
<li>%username%: The user’s username</li>
<li>%post_count%: Number of posts</li>
<li>%meta_FIELD%: Displays the given meta field. If you store a user’s Twitter name in the ‘twitter’ meta field you could use %meta_twitter% to display it.</li>
</ul>
<p>As of 1.0.9 there is also a custom ID field. This is for advanced use, mainly for developers. It allows for custom CSS stylings and even custom queries on a widget-to-widget basis.</p>
<h4>For Developers</h4>
<p>Currently there are three filters you can use to control the options available in the widget.</p>
<ul>
<li><code>ta/usable_roles</code> allows you to change the roles that can be selected. It should return an array of roles in the form of slug=>name</li>
<li><code>ta/usable_opst_types</code> allows you to change the post_types that can be selected. It should return an array of post type objects</li>
<li><code>ta/post_query</code> allows you to modify the arguments of the WP_Query which retrieves the posts that we look up the authors for. Modify the arguments if you want to force category-specific top authors on single post pages, or other similar uses</li>
</ul>


Top Authors

One of the important options of this plugin for me is the 'visibility' option and i can't get it to work at all.



Love the idea but can't get the visibility option to work

A highly customizable widget that allows you to display the top authors of your website easily.

Awesome Authors vs Top Authors