Hi all – I was wondering if one of you can help us find a solution to a feature we would like to add to a WordPress site:

The site in question has multiple contributors. Most are dedicated to certain categories. We would like to automatically display on a category page only the authors who have written articles in that particular category.

For example, let’s say we have a category called “Cucumbers” and a category called “Tomatoes.” When someone clicks on the Cucumbers category we would like only the authors who have written posts categorized as Cucumber posts to appear, and on the Tomatoes category page, we would like only the authors who have written Tomato category posts to appear. There may be some overlap between the pages, since some authors may write posts for both the Cucumber and the Tomato categories.

One solution we thought of is to call the category we want and the number of posts from that category and then display the list of authors. The problem is it shows duplicate authors. Here’s the code:

<?php query_posts('showposts=20&cat=3'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<?php the_author_posts_link (); ?>

<div style="clear:both"></div>
<?php endwhile;?>

Is there a way to prevent duplicate authors from appearing? Or is there a better way?

Thanks in advance for your help.

This post was originally published at Challenge: how to display only authors who have written in a specific category? on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Urban Giraffe has a list of amazing plugins that the guy behind the site, John Godley, developed. Many of these plugins are really unique, and I haven’t seen anything like them anywhere else.

Here are the ones that I find most interesting, and I hope to try out soon:

• Filled In – Places a customized form on your site, and stores submitted data in a database. The plugin features email reporting, AJAX support, CAPTCHA support, and file uploads. The data can be exported to CSV or XML.
• Advanced Permalinks – If you decide midway to change your permalink structure to something friendlier, this generally means you have to do it sitewide and for all existing posts, which means redirecting everything. This plugin allows you to say “From now on, all posts will have permalink structure B, while posts until now will retain permalink structure A.” Can save a lot of headache.
• Search Unleashed – Makes searching WordPress blogs more user-friendly by adding the following features:
  

  • Full text search with wildcards and logical operations
  • Search posts, pages, comments, titles, URLs, tags, and meta-data (all configurable)
  • Search data after it has been processed by plugins, not before
  • Search highlighting of all searches, including titles and comments
  • Search highlighting of incoming searches from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Baidu, and Sogou
  • Search results show contextual search information, not just a post excerpt
  • Record search phrases and display in a log
  • Exclude specific posts and pages from results
  • Compatible with WP-Cache
  • Supports WordPress 2.0.5 through to 2.3
  • No changes required to your theme

• User Permissions – Allows you to assign permissions to specific posts. This sounds like it could be good if you offer premium content on your site.
• Anti-Email Spam – Simple plugin to encode email addresses with either JavaScript or HTML entities and protect yourself against email harvesting scripts. I should have done something like this a loooong time ago.

See ‘em all at: Plugins – Goodies for WordPress | Urban Giraffe»

This post was originally published at Unique and useful WordPress Plugins at Urban Giraffe on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

If you want to create a multi-user or multi-author WordPress blog, it generally means having others register on the site, and then log in and write new posts. This has a few disadvantages:

1. You may not want to allow unlimited and unrestricted registration on your site, where unknown people gain access to your back end.
2. The registration process involves sending a confirmation mail to the user, which can get lost.
3. You may want to see posts and approve them prior to publication (which can be done with another plugin, but is not built-in to the WordPress core).

Thanks to Tal Galili and the Hebrew WordPress Google group, I just discovered TDO Mini Forms, a plugin that allows you to easily add a form to your WordPress blog where people can submit posts to your blog without registering, that you can then authorize or reject in your admin. See an example on Tal’s new blog for teachers here (in Hebrew), or TDO’s English sample page for the plugin here.

Here are some features of the TDO Mini Forms plugin:

• Posts wait as drafts until approved by admin
• Can ban specific users or IPs from using the form
• Can “trust” certain users so their posts are published automatically
• Users can select categories and tags
• Users can upload files
• Users can be notified if posts accepted or rejected

TDO Mini Forms Plugin on WordPress.org»
TDO Mini Forms Plugin homepage»

This post was originally published at Plugin creates web form that allows users to post to WordPress without registering on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.