[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #7723: Allow filtering by author on Manage > posts (or its new crazyhorse name)

[WordPress Trac]

#7723: Allow filtering by author on Manage > posts (or its new crazyhorse name)
--------------------------+-------------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  jeremyclarke  |       Owner:  anonymous
     Type:  enhancement   |      Status:  new      
 Priority:  normal        |   Milestone:  2.7      
Component:  General       |     Version:           
 Severity:  normal        |    Keywords:           
--------------------------+-------------------------------------------------
 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.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7723>
WordPress Trac <http://trac.wordpress.org/>
WordPress blogging software