danielpataki

Top authors allows yoy to list your top authors with plenty of options. You can set the following in each widget:
<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>
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.
<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>
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:
<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>
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.
<h4>For Developers</h4>
Currently there are three filters you can use to control the options available in the widget.
<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.

fmarzocca

Particularly suitable to all multi-nested categories and multi-authors website, with lots of posts and complex category layout (i.e.: academic papers, newpapers articles, etc), as weel as for single-user websites (read below). This plugin allows the user to place a shortcode into any page and get rid of a long and nested menu/submenu to show all site’s posts (including custom post types assigned to a standard category). A customizable selector in the page will allow the reader to select grouping by Category/Author/Title.
Shortcode’s options include:
<ul>
<li>excluding any category from the list</li>
<li>excluding/including admin users from the list</li>
<li>single-user website usage</li>
<li>select what list(s) to display</li>
<li>limit number of posts in list output </li>
<li>Show (optional) post date</li>
<li>Show in reverse date order</li>
</ul>
Output grouped by Category will look like:
<pre><code>CAT1
 post1 AUTHOR
 SUBCAT1
 post2 AUTHOR
 post3 AUTHOR
 SUBCAT2
 post4 AUTHOR
 ...
 ...
</code></pre>
Shortcode generator
The plugin installs a new menu ACT List Shortcodes in Admin->Tools. The tool is a helper to automatically generate the required shortcode. It will parse the options and display the string to be copied and pasted into any page. Please refer to the plugin admin page for a full list of options.
Default manual usage:
[ACT-list]
all categories and subcategories post, excluding administrator’s posts, grouped by (upon selection) Category/Author/Title
Exclude categories:
[ACT-list exclude=”cat1-slug, cat2-slug, …”]
listed categories will be excluded. Categories must be listed with their slugnames.
Include admin’s posts:
[ACT-list admin=1]
this option will also include all admin’s posts in the list.
Single-user website:
[ACT-list singleuser=1]
this option is suited for websites with a single author (or when you don’t want to show the authors). It removes grouping by Authors and any author name. This option includes the admin=1 option, so that it will list any post in the website. You can still apply “excluding categories” option.
Select what list(s) to display
The parameter “show” will allow the admin to select what lists will be shown and if the dropdown selector is needed or not. i.e.:
[ACT-list show=”Category, Author”]
or
[ACT-list show=”Title, Category”]
Allowed terms for the “show” parameter are: Author, Title, Category.
Split the lists into separate pages
By selecting only one variable in the “show” parameter, you will be able to show only one list without the dropdown selector. This will enable you to put the 3 lists into separate pages, or separate tabs of the same page.
Page#1 (or tab#1) 
[ACT-list show=”Category”]
Page#2 (or tab#2) 
[ACT-list show=”Author”]
Page#3 (or tab#3) 
[ACT-list show=”Title”]
Limit the number of posts in the lists
If you have a large numbers of posts (>2,000), it could be convenient to limit the number of posts in the lists, including only a certain amount of the most recent posts. This can be achieved separately for the 3 lists using the following parameters: postspercategory, postsperauthor, totalpoststitle. i.e.:
[ACT-list show=”Category” postspercategory=”20″] will show only the 20 most recent posts for each category.
Show posts list in reverse date order
By default, the posts will be listed from newest to oldest. To change this behaviour, use the reverse-date=1 parameter.
Show posts date (v.>=2.7.0)
The date of the post could be printed out before the post name, optionally
<blockquote>
If you like the plugin, feel free to rate it (on the right side of this page) or <a href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=4EH3N5XZJZCRQ" rel="nofollow ugc">donate via PayPal</a>. Thanks a lot! 🙂
</blockquote>

List all posts by Authors, nested Categories and Titles

This plugin lists all posts by Author, nested Categories and Title, allowing to place the lists in any page.

Top Authors vs List all posts by Authors, nested Categories and Titles