Laravel Eloquent query to pull the authors with the most posts connected by a hasMany relationship

readme.md

Laravel Eloquent Query by Relationships

Needed this for a WordPress to Laravel conversion project I'm working on. For the footer I needed to pull the top authors, sorted by the number of posts associated with them. On the site, it's actually fonts, but posts makes more sense for most people.

popular_authors.php

<?php
/**
 * Returns the $count authors with the most posts, optionally
 * sorted by name after pulling the most popular
 * 
 * @param type $count How many authors to pull
 * @param boolean $sort_name  If true, sort the found authors
 *  by name after pulling off the $count most popular. 
 */
public static function popular_authors( $count = 24, $sort_name = true ) {
  $authors = \App\Author::withCount('posts')->orderBy('posts_count', 'desc')->take($count)->get();

  if ($sort_name) {
    $authors = $authors->sortBy('name');
  }

  return $authors; 
}