This plugin provides a widget to showcase your site's authors. When configuring the widget you select the authors and choose whether to display them with their avatars and choose how many posts to display for authors.

Can it show x?

Probably. Please post feature requests in the support forum.

Can I modify the posts?

Sure, there's a filter you can hook into, 'cd_fa_post_query' to alter what posts are fetched for each author. Modify the query as needed to get the results you're looking for. It passes the arguments that will be passed to the WP_Query class. For example you could add a taxonomy term query arguments and return the arguments to only show posts by the author that have the particular term.

2.1.0

Added new filter, 'cd_fa_post_query' which you can use to alter the query. It passes a standard WP Query argument array.

2.0.4

Tested WordPress 4.6

2.0.3

Tested WordPress 4.5. Added customizer support for selective refresh

2.0.2

Added logic to permit users to set number of posts per author to 0.

2.0.1

Fixed array variable declaration.

2.0

Updated to comply with php5 constructor. Added ajax to admin UI to re-order the selected authors. Misc small code clean up

1.1

Added ability to sort the authors using the default sort options available in get_users(). Need to add other sort options like menu order and random in the future. Also need to improve how the order is saved so you only have to save the widget once.

1.0

• Initial Release

1. Upload featured-authors-widget to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress
3. Add the widget to your sidebar through the 'Appearance->Widgets menu.
4. Configure the widget.