Display Random Author with Details in Sidebar

PHP newbie here, recently decided to have a stab at cobbling together a kooky little ‘Random Author Spotlight’ feature into my current WordPress theme. I’m almost done, but I’ve hit something of a snag: I need to somehow make it so that my ‘spotlight’ will only select users with 1 post or more.

Everyone whom registers on my blog immediately becomes a Subscriber and is able to post news directly on the front page, but most are content with just being regular, post-less members.

I’ll only be able to incorporate the ‘spotlight’ into my theme if I can get it to randomly select a user whom has submitted 1 post or more.

Here’s the code so far:

<section id="sidebarAuthorSpotlight">
    <?php $users = get_users(); $id = array_rand( $users, 1 ); $user = $users[$id]; ?>
    Hey, have you met...
    <h3><a class="" href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/91320/<?php echo the_permalink(); ?>"><?php echo $user->display_name; ?></a></h3>
    <div><?php echo get_avatar( $user->ID, '60' ); ?></div>
    Mods: <?php echo count_user_posts($user->ID); ?>
    <?php echo $register_date = date("F d, Y", strtotime(get_the_author_meta('user_registered'))); ?>
    <div class="clear"></div>
    <ol class="sidebarPosts">
        <?php $random_author_box = new WP_Query(array('author' => $user->ID,'posts_per_page' => '5')); if ($random_author_box->have_posts() ) : while ($random_author_box->have_posts() ) : $random_author_box->the_post(); ?>
            <li>
                <a class="sidebarPostTitle" href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/91320/<?php echo the_permalink(); ?>"><?php echo the_title(); ?></a>
            </li>
        <?php endwhile; endif; ?>
    </ol>
    <div class="clear"></div>
</section>

Ideally, I’d also love to be able to tweak the registration date to some ‘X registered Y days ago’, but I’m happy to cross that bridge at a later time. At the moment, I’m in desperate need of getting the above code to filter out users with 0 posts, and only pull users — or rather a user — with 1 or more posts.

If anyone could help, I would be so eternally grateful. As someone whom is only now starting to learn the basics of PHP, I can honestly say that I’m in over my head at this point. I look forward to hearing from you guys and thank you each for reading and looking into my plight. Woe is me!

Edit: I am so silly! I should probably explain what the code above does do: the code above does indeed display a random user and provides them with a ‘spotlight’ area in the sidebar, but it will pull users even with a post count of 0. As explained previous: if it pulled only users with a post count of 1 or more, it would be near-flawless.

Your best option is to get a random post author which is a user ID so here is a function to do just that:

function get_random_author_wpa91320(){
    global $wpdb;
    $id = $wpdb->get_var("
        SELECT post_author
        FROM $wpdb->posts
        WHERE post_type="post"
        AND post_status="publish"
        ORDER BY RAND()
        LIMIT 1
        ");
    return $id;
}

And once you have that function in your theme’s functions.php file you can replace this line:

<?php $users = get_users(); $id = array_rand( $users, 1 ); $user = $users[$id]; ?>

with

<?php $user = get_user_by('id', get_random_author_wpa91320() ); ?>

Update

here is a modified version to get all users from the database who have at least on post and use PHP rand to return a random id

function get_random_author_wpa91320_2(){
    global $wpdb;
    //this will get all users with posts
    $ids = $wpdb->get_col("
        SELECT DISTINCT post_author
        FROM $wpdb->posts
        WHERE post_type="post"
        AND post_status="publish"
        "
    );
    return $ids[rand(0,count($ids) -1)];
}

This way is like you count every user once and not based on the post number he has.