expressionengine - expression engine sql query entries list by authors

Question

How would I order the latest 3 entries from a channel with each entry from a different author? (so they don't end up being 3 latest entries by the same author) - I think I need to use an SQL Query for it?

{exp:channel:entries orderby="screen_name|date" channel="portfolios" limit="3" group_id="5" dynamic="no"}
<img src=" {thumbnail}" alt="{title}"/><br />
{title}<br />
{/exp:channel:entries} 

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Mark - here's a repost of the answer I posted on the other dupe question:

---

The best approach here, since you need your custom fields parsed, is to first find the entry_ids of the latest 4 entries from distinct authors, and then pass those to the channel:entries tag through an embed using the entry_id parameter.

This should work (be sure to replace the channel_id with the appropriate integer). Replace your entire current chunk of code with this:

{embed="embeds/_latest_per_member" entry_ids="{exp:query sql="SELECT entry_id, author_id FROM exp_channel_titles WHERE entry_date IN( SELECT MAX(entry_date) FROM exp_channel_titles  WHERE status != 'closed' AND channel_id = 1 GROUP BY author_id ) ORDER BY entry_date DESC LIMIT 4" backspace="1"}{entry_id}|{/exp:query}"}

Then your embeds/_latest_per_member template can look something like this:

{exp:channel:entries channel="channel_name" entry_id="{embed:entry_ids}"}
    {author_id}<br />
    <a href="{path=portfolios/gallery/{username}}"><img src="{thumbnail}"></a><br>
    <a href="{path=portfolios/gallery/{username}}">{title}</a><br />
{/exp:channel:entries}

You had mentioned that this code gave you a recursive error - that means that you've put another call to the embed within the embed. Don't do that.