id,summary,reporter,owner,description,type,status,priority,milestone,component,version,severity,resolution,keywords,cc
7723,Allow filtering by author on Manage > Posts,jeremyclarke,anonymous,"In versions of wp before 2.5 you could select an author from a dropdown on MANAGE > POSTS to see only posts owned by that author. This was very useful for quickly sorting posts and is absolutely necessary when you have editor users without  the 'edit_users' capability, as unlike admin users (most of us) they don't have access to the 'users' tab and thus have no way to see the manage screen sorted by user. The manage screen sorts by user simply by adding ?&author=$id in the url, but for users without access to the 'users' tab, even author id's are innaccessible. 

In the #wordpress-dev irc channel ryan boren expressed that the filter was removed because in some cases there were too many users in the system and the resulting dropdown was slowing down pageload time and ruining user experience. This is a paradox, because the more users your system has the more likely you are to need this filter. 

Wordpress needs to support filtering by author somehow if it wants to be a serious multi-user platform. Our editors are pulling out their hair.

My personal opinion is that the dropdown select should be reinstated. Filters should be added to the list such that only users who can post are listed (other users have no use in the Manage > Posts screen), as well as to show only users with at least 1 post. This should avoid slowing down pages for installations where most users are 'subscribers', which would otherwise mean all open-registration blogs would have hugely long lists. 

Given those two filters, I think that anyone who still has load-time problems should deal with their problem themselves using a plugin. It should be easy to remove the filter dropdown if you don't want it using a plugin, as well as to further filter the authors shown to reduce their number. 

Any installation with that many users deserves the option of deciding if they want the pulldown or not, and I think many would choose to keep it even if there are problems because it is so incredibly useful in filtering through hundreds of users worth of posts. 

(Consider: the full categories list is shown, even if there are hundreds, despite the fact that this has the same effect on performance as many authors does). 

Also in IRC Matt M proposed that some kind of text box + ajax to predict which author you mean could be used for this purpose. I think that is a great idea but would take a lot more work than what I propose (the work for hte pulldown is already done and the old functions are still there, all that's needed is to add filtering and re-work it into edit.php). It could also be used in the 'Users' context for search though, so it could be worth the effort. ",enhancement,reopened,normal,Future Release,Administration,,normal,,needs-patch,jeremyclarke xoodrew@…