- 2026-08-07
- by LethaldiranMX
- Trends
- 0 Comments
LethaldiranMX Insight
The Author Avatars List/Block plugin addresses a common community-building requirement in WordPress by providing a highly configurable way to showcase site contributors, team members, or community participants. By leveraging core WordPress user retrieval functions and extending them with Gutenberg blocks, shortcodes, and widgets, it bridges the gap between raw user database records and front-end presentation. Its deep integration with multisite networks, BuddyPress, BBPress, and Co-Authors Plus makes it an essential tool for multi-author blogs and membership portals looking to increase user engagement and visual recognition.
Best Fit & Operational Role: This plugin is best suited for community managers, multi-author editorial platforms, and developers managing BuddyPress or Multisite installations who need to dynamically display user directories without writing custom database queries. It functions as a lightweight presentation layer in the WordPress stack, solving the operational challenge of manually updating staff pages or contributor lists by automating the output based on user roles, activity, or group affiliations.
Potential Limitations & Pitfalls: Querying and rendering large volumes of user avatars on highly populated multisite networks or large community forums can introduce database overhead and increase page load times. To mitigate this, developers must actively utilize the pagination controls and limit query sizes, while ensuring robust object caching is configured to handle the user metadata queries efficiently.
Display lists of user avatars using widgets or shortcodes. With Gutenberg support.
This plugin makes it easy to display lists of user avatars, grouped by user roles, on your (multiuser) site. It also allows you to insert single avatars for blog users or any email address into a post or page – great for displaying an image of someone you’re talking about.
It makes use of built-in WordPress (core) functions to retrieve user information and get avatars.
Integrates with: Gutenberg, BuddyPress, xprofile, Multisite, Wpmu, BBPress, co-authors.
Avatar lists can be inserted into your sidebar by adding a widget or into posts/pages by using a shortcode. The plugin comes with a tinymce editor plugin which makes inserting shortcodes very easy.
This also provides Gutenberg Block for use with the Gutenberg editor.
Please help with the plugin Translations at https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/author-avatars.
Both the shortcode and widget and Gutenberg Block can be configured to:
- Show a custom title (widget only)
- Only show specific user groups and/or hide certain users
- Limit the number of users shown
- Change the sort order of users or show in random order
- Adjust the size of user avatars
- Optionally show a user’s name or biography
- Show users from the current blog, all blogs or a selection of blogs (on WPMU/Multisite)
- Group users by their blog (when showing from multiple blogs), and show the blog name above each grouping.
- Support users from Co-Author Plus, Ultimate Member, BBpress and BuddyPress (xprofile)
- Limit the number of avatars per page for large sets by adding a page_size to the shortcode e.g. “page_size=30” (shortcode only)
Additionally, single user avatars can be inserted using the show_avatar shortcode and configured to:
- Adjust the size of the user avatar.
- Align the avatar left, centered or right.
The Gutenberg Block support both single user avatars and role based selections of avatars
Please report bugs and provide feedback in the wordpress support forum.
Plugin support: In 2011, Ben stepped down as maintainer of the Plugin, handing over ownership to co-author Paul Bearne, who continues to provide support and drive the development of new features.
Editorial note: This overview combines WordPress.org official plugin metadata with an AI-assisted LethaldiranMX editorial review. Plugin data should be verified on the official WordPress.org listing before installation.
