Only displays Administrators

Hey Laura

Thanks for your support request!

That sounds super odd. Normally, the shortcode works as you expected and I just tested it successfully on a fresh local install. But I’m sure we can figure this one out together.

First, have you also tried using the widget? Please let me know if listing authors works there or not.

Also, which other plugins are installed? Maybe another plugin modifies the behaviour of the user queries we run.

I’ll try it on some other sites as well, to determine if it’s really a bug in our plugin or not.

Cheers
Pascal

Hi Pascal — thank you for looking into this! I’ve figured out a workaround but it would still be great to get to the bottom of what’s going on.

Currently I have three users — myself (an Administrator), and two Authors. Here are the behaviors I’m seeing:

• When I use shortcode [rplus_team_list], I am the only user who gets listed. Changing other users’ roles to Administrator causes them to show up too, but any users with the Author role are not listed.
• This part gets really weird… since I currently only have users in Administrator and Author roles, I tried to do a workaround by using shortcode [rplus_team_list role=”Administrator”] followed by shortcode [rplus_team_list role=”Author”]. Initially even using [rplus_team_list role=”Author”] generated a list that showed only Administrators — that’s when I opened this support thread. But then it started working as expected — I have no idea why! So this is the workaround I’m currently using, which you can see in action here: Our Team | Seattle Learning Network.
• I also tried modifying the shortcodes so users would be ordered by role and then by last name, like so: [rplus_team_list role=”Administrator” orderby=”last_name” order=”desc”]
  [rplus_team_list role=”Author” orderby=”last_name” order=”desc”]. This causes users to be listed 12 times.

The plugins I have active are Akismet, Contact Form 7, Hide Comment Author Link, Odyno GoogleGroups, Relevanssi, SZ – Google, TablePress, TablePress Extension: Auomatic URL Conversion, The Events Calendar, and WP Team List.

I’m hoping ultimately to find a way to display custom user roles so I can list people on the team as “Organizers” and “Members” instead of “Authors,” but I figure if there’s already some sort of strange plugin interaction going on it’s a good idea to hold off on that for now.

Thanks again for your help!

Ha, whoops… am realizing that attempting to order by “last_name” was silly. Please just ignore that part — ordering by “name” works fine. I’m still puzzled by not being able to list all users with [rplus_team_list] but since the workaround of using a list for each role is working I’m inclined to continue on and experiment to see if I can display custom roles by using WP Team List in conjunction with WPFront User Role Editor.

Hey Laura

Thanks a lot your detailed investigation report.

The shortcode defaults to showing only users with the role Administrator. I think that’s the behaviour you’ve seen. Listing all users should work with role="all". I have to admit this isn’t very well described in the readme and we will update this accordingly.

I also tried modifying the shortcodes so users would be ordered by role and then by last name. This causes users to be listed 12 times.

That really sounds like a bug. Is it only happening when using the shortcode twice in a post?

Ha, whoops… am realizing that attempting to order by “last_name” was silly. Please just ignore that part — ordering by “name” works fine.

Strange. I actually added support for ordering by “last_name” in 1.0.4, so I’m not sure what’s going on here.

I’m inclined to continue on and experiment to see if I can display custom roles by using WP Team List in conjunction with WPFront User Role Editor.

When a plugin adds new user roles using WordPress’ built-in hooks, that should work. But let me know nonetheless.

The shortcode defaults to showing only users with the role Administrator. I think that’s the behaviour you’ve seen. Listing all users should work with role=”all”. I have to admit this isn’t very well described in the readme and we will update this accordingly.

That works! I’d just assumed the default was to list all users, so it’s good to know that wasn’t an unexpected behaviour. I think at one point I tried putting “All” to list all but since it’s case-sensitive that didn’t work and I was thrown off the scent.

That really sounds like a bug. Is it only happening when using the shortcode twice in a post?

Let’s see… nah, i just tried using a single shortcode on the page ([rplus_team_list role=”all” orderby=”last_name” order=”asc”]) and I got one listing for Mark appearing first, followed by Sanda listed twelve times, follow by me listed once. Switching to order=”desc” gives me the same thing in he reverse order: me listed once, followed by Sanda listed twelve times, followed by Mark listed once. For kicks I tried adding another user — an Author named “Stephen Dewhurst.” He also appeared in the listing 12 times (me once, Sanda 12 times, Stephen 12 times, and Mark once). Though, this is weird — I edited his first and last names so they were just “S” and “D,” respectively (username remained the same) and now he only shows up in the list once (me once, Sanda 12 times, Stephen once, Mark once). Make of that what you will!

When a plugin adds new user roles using WordPress’ built-in hooks, that should work. But let me know nonetheless.

WP Team List and WPFront User Role Editor are playing together beautifully. I’ve created an “Organizer” role with the same permissions as Author and using the shortcode [rplus_team_list role=”Organizer”] gives exactly what I’d want. The only hiccup I’m running into is that I’d like to list my role as “Organizer, Webmaster” or “Organizer/Webmaster” …something along those lines. So I’ve tried creating a role of that name, experimenting with different variants, and I haven’t yet found one that WP Team List will display. So far I’ve tried [rplus_team_list role=”Organizer, Webmaster”], [rplus_team_list role=”Organizer / Webmaster”], [rplus_team_list role=”Organizer/Webmaster”], and [rplus_team_list role=”Organizer and Webmaster”]. I’m guessing it’s not liking commas/slashes/spaces in role names… do you think that’s what’s going on?

Hey Laura

Sorry for the long time without an answer!

I was quite busy, but today I finally managed to release a small update for the plugin.

First of all, I really couldn’t reproduce the duplicated results problem, especially since there has been a mechanism in place for quite a while that filters duplicate entries right before outputting them (using array_unique()).
If that still occurs using the latest version, I’d have to test this on your site if possible.

Second, I just tried it out with custom roles (using the great Members plugin) and it worked like a charm. The thing to keep in mind (and I learned today) is that the role passed to the shortcode must be lowercase and may only contain alphanumeric characters and underscores.

I’m not sure how your plugin internally saves the Organizer, Webmaster role, but perhaps that gets displayed somewhere. Otherwise you need to ask the plugin author.

Marking this as resolved for now as I haven’t heard brack from you in over 2 weeks.