Querying author info from wordpress database

Question

I have an author page in my Wordpress blog but I also would like to show the amount of posts per author as a number. I don't know much about database queries so I would like to know how to extend the following query with the amount of posts per user.

Here's my code so far:

   function contributors() {
    global $wpdb;

    $authors = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT ID, user_nicename from $wpdb->users WHERE display_name <> 'admin' ORDER BY display_name");


        foreach ($authors as $author ) {

        echo "<li>";
        echo "<div class='author-image'>";
        echo "<a href=\"".get_bloginfo('url')."/?author=";
        echo $author->ID;
        echo "\">";
        echo userphoto($author->ID);
        echo "</a>";
        echo "</div>";
        echo "<div class='meta'>";
        echo "<h2 class='author-name'>";
        the_author_meta('display_name', $author->ID);
        echo "</h2>";
        echo "<span class='count'>";
        count_user_posts($author->ID); //Not working
        echo " Articles</span>";
        echo "<p class='description'>";
        the_author_meta('description', $author->ID);
        echo "</p>";
        echo "<span class='top-dotted'></span>";
        echo "</div>";
        echo "</li>";
        }
    }

Answer 1

You'll just need to add a subselect to calculate this per user.

I can achieve basically the correct result using the following query:

SELECT ID, 
    user_nicename, 
    (select count(*) from wp_posts where post_author=w.ID) as posts 
FROM wp_users w 
WHERE display_name <> 'admin' 
ORDER BY display_name

Note the I have name the table wp_users in the query w so we can reference the correct ID in the subselect.