Pagination Help on Crazy Custom Authors Page

I’ve got a custom authors page for a multi-author blog.

http://blog.securitytechnologies.com/meet-the-team/

Here’s the code I’m using to generate the page (thanks to other folks in the support forums for providing it):

<?php
$excluded = "1,2,3,7,20,21";  // To exclude external admin author IDs
$sql = "SELECT DISTINCT post_author, umeta.meta_value as last_name
FROM $wpdb->posts
JOIN $wpdb->usermeta umeta ON ($wpdb->posts.post_author = umeta.user_id
AND umeta.meta_key = 'last_name')
WHERE post_author NOT IN ($excluded)
AND post_status="publish"
AND post_type="post"
ORDER BY last_name, post_author
";
$authors = $wpdb->get_results($sql);    
if($authors):
foreach($authors as $author):
?>    

What I can’t figure out is how to set a maximum number of authors per page and paginate. I’ve got WP-PageNavi installed, but I’m not having any luck implementing it here on a custom template page.

Thanks in advance.

I doubt you’re going to be able to repurpose WP-PageNavi for this, since you’re not using the built-in queries at all. You should be able to roll pagination yourself, though, and still fall back on some of WordPress’s built-in functionality.

In particular, if your URL matches the pattern /meet-the-team/page/3/, the paged querystring variable will automatically be filled with 3. You can use that, then just loop through the correct authors in your list. Here’s a bit of quick code:

<?php
$authors_per_page = 5;
$page_number = preg_replace("/[^0-9]/", "", $_GET["paged"]); // don't trust querystring vars
if (empty($page_number))
    $page_number = 1;

$excluded = "1,2,3,7,20,21";  // To exclude external admin author IDs
$sql = "..."; // SQL unchanged, omitted

$authors = $wpdb->get_results($sql);    
if ($authors) :
    $author_count = count($authors);
    $first_author = ($page_number - 1) * $authors_per_page;
    $last_author = min($first_author + $authors_per_page, $author_count);

    foreach ($i = $first_author; $i < $last_author; $i++) :
?>    

<!-- display author -->

<?php
    endforeach;

    // show previous and next page links
    if ($page_number > 1) {
        echo '<a href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/meet-the-team/page/" . ($page_number - 1) . "https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/">Previous page</a>';
    }
    if ($last_author < $author_count) {
        echo '<a href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/meet-the-team/page/" . ($page_number + 1) . "https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/">Next page</a>';
    }

endif;
?>