Breadcrumbs - get the author?

Question

I have my own function called breadcrumbs(). In it I call is_author() to determine whether I am on an author page. If true I would like to know which author's page I am on. I tried the_author(), but nothing came up. I looked through the WP codex also. Can someone please help?

Answer 1

Call echo $GLOBALS['wp_query']->query_vars['author_name']; and it should show you the author.

You can also echo $GLOBALS['wp_query']->post->post_author; or echo $GLOBALS['wp_query']->queried_object->post_author;.

hope i didn't mix up with arrays and objects.

Answer 2

So I figured it out by looking at the author.php file included with the twenty ten theme. Apparently you need to first gain access to the posts before creating breadcrumb. Following code worked for me:

if (is_author()) {      
    the_post();
    echo '<a href="">Author Archive for '.get_the_author().'</a>';
    rewind_posts(); //or first post will be cut off
}

Answer 3

Because people are often confused about how to get data from global objects/vars

Use this to get an insight view of what you can use from the current request/wp_query.

function inspect_wp_query() 
{
  echo '<pre>';
    print_r($GLOBALS['wp_query'])
  echo '</pre>';
}
add_action( 'template_redirect' ); // Query on public facing pages
add_action( 'admin_notices' ); // Query in admin UI

Btw:

    // this:
    global $wp_query;
    $wp_query;
    // is the same as
    $wp_query;
    // and as this:
    $GLOBALS['wp_query'];

// You can do this with each other global var too, like $post, etc.

How to actually get the data:

// Example (not the best one)
Object WP_Query -> post stdClass -> postdata Array

// How to get the data:
// Save object into var
$my_data = new WP_Query; // on a new object
// or on the global available object from the current request
$my_data = $GLOBALS['wp_query'];

// get object/stdClass
$my_post_data = $my_data->post;
// get Array
$my_post_data = $my_data['post'];