Sidebar random author spotlight

Question

I'm trying to utilize the authors from wordpress to create a spotlight block in the sidebar that selects 1 random author from multiple users and only displays that 1 users information. I want to include the author's display name, a thumbnail, snippet of their bio and a link to the full author page. I haven't found any plugins that support this. I'm not a PHP/MySQL wiz so custom writing a function is a bit outside my abilities however I can read it and follow the code. What I have so far is:

<?php 
    global $wpdb;
    $ids = $wpdb->get_results( "SELECT {$wpdb->usermeta}.user_id from {$wpdb->usermeta} where ({$wpdb->usermeta}.meta_key='wp_capabilities') and ({$wpdb->usermeta}.meta_value >0 )" );
    $user_id = rand(1,count($ids));
    $wpdb->show_errors(); 
?>
<h2><?php get_the_author_meta( 'display_name', $user_id ); ?></h2>
<img class="left" src="" alt="<?php print $selected_user; ?>" />
<p><?php get_the_author_meta( 'user_description', $user_id ); ?> <a href="<?php get_the_author_meta( 'user_url', $user_id ); ?>">read more</a>

This returns an array but I am unsure of what to do to get the output I need. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can cut a lot of steps out of this if you use get_users() instead of your custom SQL query. You can then select a random user out of that array using array_rand() (native PHP function, not a wordpress function) and it will return the key you should be using. Here's an example:

$users = get_users( $your_params );
$id = array_rand( $users, 1 );

$user = $users[$id];

This will leave you with $user, which will contain a user object with just about everything you could want on a user...or at least the ability to obtain what you need. get_avatar() will do the thumbnail...assuming you want the default.