A neat feature for wordpress blogs or custom sites is to show the author biography and other information on the ‘author archive’ page.

For this we could use the ‘the_author_meta()‘ or get_the_author_meta functions to get the meta information we need, but if we want to show the author info outside the loop, so that even if the user hasn’t published any posts, it will still be visible. In order to do this we will get an object with all the info we need.

$userInfo = get_user_by('slug', get_query_var('author_name'));

and this holds all the info we need, and we will get it like this:

echo $userInfo->display_name
echo $userInfo->first_name
echo $userInfo->last_name
echo $userInfo->eme_phone
echo $userInfo->user_email
echo $userInfo->user_url
echo nl2br($userInfo->description)
//etc

the nl2br() php function is used to return the user description with <br /> which are striped out by wordpress.

And changing the first parameter of the get_user_by function, to one of the supported values $field = ‘id’, ‘slug’, ’email’, or ‘login’ , you can use this object in all places you need.