I just posted my first plugin to wordpress.org. It creates an unordered list of the most recent posts by a given author. It can be called both from within a post using a shortcode or from within a theme file. Check out Latest Posts by Author at wordpress.org for more details.

To demonstrate just how easy it is to create a plugin for WordPress, I’m posting the plugin code below.

<?php

/*
Plugin Name: Latest Posts by Author
Plugin URI: http://wordpress.org/#
Description: Displays a list of recent posts by the specified author
Author: Alex Mansfield
Version: 0.6
Author URI: http://alexmansfield.com/
*/

function latest_posts_by_author($array) {
 extract(shortcode_atts(array('author' => 'admin', 'show' => 5, 'excerpt' => 'false'), $array));

 global $wpdb;
 $table = $wpdb->prefix . 'users';
 $result = $wpdb->get_results('SELECT ID FROM '.$table.' WHERE user_login = "'.$author.'"');
 $id = $result[0]->ID;
 $table = $wpdb->prefix . 'posts';
 $result = $wpdb->get_results('SELECT * FROM '.$table.' WHERE post_author = '.$id.' AND post_status = "publish" AND post_type = "post" ORDER BY post_date DESC');
 $i = 0;
 $html = '<ul>';
 foreach ($result as $numpost) {
 $html .= '<li><a href="'.get_permalink($numpost->ID).'">'.$numpost->post_title.'</a>';
 if($excerpt == 'true'){
 $html .= '<p>'.$numpost->post_excerpt.'</p>';
 }
 $html .= '</li>';
 $i++;
 if($i == $show){
 break;
 }
 }
 $html .= '</ul>';

 return $html;
}

add_shortcode('latestbyauthor', 'latest_posts_by_author');

?>