id,summary,reporter,owner,description,type,status,priority,milestone,component,version,severity,resolution,keywords,cc
14408,Get author information in author template file without having to query the first post,garyc40,garyc40,"In the template file author.php, Twenty Ten queries the first post of the author to get the author's profile information. This introduces a bug when the author has no blog posts yet, then the global $authordata is not set, as a result, no author information is displayed. Also, having to rewind the query later in the template is counter-intuitive.

One may argue that there's no need to display author information if that author doesn't have any blog posts yet. But I disagree. Theme developers might want to list custom posts on the author template file as well. For some sites, the author page is served as a member profile page for subscribers. Therefore having to query the first post in order to get the requested author information is a flawed approach.

One better way to fetch author information in the author template is by getting the query var 'author' for the author ID. Then use get_author_meta() with the second parameter to get the desired information.


{{{
$author_id = get_query_var( 'author' );
$author_description = get_the_author_meta( 'description', $author_id );
}}}


I attached a patch that addresses this issue.

In this patch, get_author_meta() is also modified to handle the ""display_name"" field correctly by applying the filter ""the_author"" whenever this field is fetched.

Another approach, which I haven't tested yet, is to set the $authordata global variable whenever the author query var is set. If that's possible, then we no longer need to supply $author_id to get_the_author_meta(). If anyone is interested in testing this approach, go ahead and create a patch.",enhancement,assigned,normal,Future Release,Themes,3.0,normal,,has-patch,