WordPress Top Authors List Without a Plugin

WordPress engine allows to create sites with big number of users of different levels. And authors, which have corresponding right, can fill the site content. On such a multi-user sites will be useful to have a list with top authors.

In this post I will show you one of the ways how to display list of the top authors without using a plugin.

You can use the following small function:

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function top_authors_list($number = 10) {
  $u = array();
  $authors = get_users_of_blog();
  if ($authors) {
    foreach ($authors as $author) {
      $post_count = get_usernumposts($author->user_id);
      $u[$author->user_id] = $post_count;
    }
    arsort($u);
    $i = 0;
    echo '<ul>' . "\n";
    foreach ($u as $key => $value) {
      $i++;
      if ($i <= $number) {
        $user = get_userdata($key);
        $author_posts_url = get_author_posts_url($key);
        $post_count = $value;
        if ($post_count > 0) {
          echo '<li><a href="' . $author_posts_url .'">' . $user->display_name . '</a> (' . $post_count . ')</li>' . "\n";
        }
      }
    }
    echo '</ul>';
  }
}

Paste this function in the functions.php file of your theme and then put the following code in a place of your theme, where you want to see the top authors list:

<?php if (function_exists('top_authors_list')) top_authors_list(10); ?>

10 here is the number of authors you want to show in the list.

That’s all.

As a result you will see the list of top authors with their names and number of published posts. Author’s name is linked to his archive page where is a list of all his posts.

List of top authors is sorted by number of posts.