Get WordPress Author Page Url With User ID

Here is another WordPress tip for people who face problem finding the function to retrieves WordPress author page url using a particular user id. I did find a lot of WordPress functions that require them to be used within the loop. However, i need a particular function which takes in a user id as a parameter and provide the author page url to me outside the loop. I spend some time searching on Google but couldn't find a decent page that provide me with this information (well, i found a lot of junk page around the internet nowadays though.). Hence, i went into the core and look for it myself. Lucky there was such function!

WordPress Get Author Page Function

if you try to find the author core functions codes, it will lead you to wp-include/author-template.php file. Once you scan through the functions within the file, you will notice that there are only a few methods that take in parameters. Hence, its not that difficult to find. On line 197 you will notice the function get_author_posts_url as shown below,

function get_author_posts_url($author_id, $author_nicename = '') {
	global $wp_rewrite;
	$auth_ID = (int) $author_id;
	$link = $wp_rewrite->get_author_permastruct();

	if ( empty($link) ) {
		$file = get_option('home') . '/';
		$link = $file . '?author=' . $auth_ID;
	} else {
		if ( '' == $author_nicename ) {
			$user = get_userdata($author_id);
			if ( !empty($user->user_nicename) )
				$author_nicename = $user->user_nicename;
		}
		$link = str_replace('%author%', $author_nicename, $link);
		$link = get_option('home') . trailingslashit($link);
	}

	$link = apply_filters('author_link', $link, $author_id, $author_nicename);

	return $link;
}

And you can use this function this way

$curauth = get_userdata(get_query_var('author'));
$current_link = get_author_posts_url($curauth->ID,$curauth->display_name);

You can don't provide the second parameter, display_name but it is advisable to do so as you will notice above that the core function will try to retrieve from the database if you omit the second parameter which also means an additional sql query which is not something we want 🙂