If contributor has published 2 or more posts then show otherwise hide

Question

If the contributor has already published two or more posts I show a maximum of 5 of them in the post-single.php using this code

<?php echo do_shortcode('[latestbyauthor show="5"]'); ?>

I have a text that introduces the code (other posts by the same author)

This works fine if the contributor really has published 2 or more article but totally uselless if he has just one post.

What I'm looking is a way to hide the text before the code by checking the total number of posts published, if 1 then hide and if 2 then show.

Is it possible? Thanks!

Answer 1

Simpler than using the $wpdb class would be to use count_user_posts(). For instance:

$min_posts = 2;
if( count_user_posts( $post->post_author ) >= $min_posts ) {
    // display the user's posts
}

This assumes you're in The Loop, or at the very least that $post is a WordPress Post object.

[above edited 2013-03-19 11:30 AM CDT]

Note that if you're trying to count custom post types (and possibly pages, though I'm not sure), you'll need to use some $wpdb magic, but there's a code sample available at the Codex page for count_user_posts() (linked above).

Answer 2

You could run a query to grab an array of the number of posts by each author, and then check that array. This is untested, so may need tweeking (a Google search of 'mysql count occurrences of value' should also yield some results.

$query = 'SELECT post_author, COUNT(*) as count FROM wp_posts GROUP BY post_author ORDER BY count DESC'
$author_count = $wpdb->get_col($query);

Then, when you are checking the number of posts by that author -

if($author_count($author_id)) > 1) : // Where $author_id is the ID of the Author being shown
    // Do whatever here...
endif;

Finally, if you get an error, you may need to add global $wpdb; just before the $query = ... line