Get the_category outside of loop - wordpress

Question

I'm working on a site that has custom author pages and on the author pages it has a recent author posts widget which displays other posts by that author. This site has multiple authors so it is different for every post and I haven't found a plugin that does this. I'm trying to display the post thumbnail, title, and category name.
I'm using a function that is displaying the title and the thumbnail, but it doesn't have the category . I tried to add the category in with: the_category(' ','multiple',$authors_post->ID) unfortunately it displays all of the categories in the first li. Instead of for each post.
Here is what I'm working with:
function get_related_author_posts() {
global $authordata, $post;
$authors_posts = get_posts( array( 'author' => $authordata->ID,
'post__not_in' => array( $post->ID ), 'posts_per_page' => 3 ) );
$output = '<ul>';
foreach ( $authors_posts as $authors_post ) {
$output .= '<li>' . get_the_post_thumbnail( $authors_post->ID, 'xsmall-thumb' )
. '<p>' . the_category(' ','multiple',$authors_post->ID)
. '</p> <a href="' . get_permalink( $authors_post->ID )
. '">' . apply_filters( 'the_title', $authors_post->post_title,
$authors_post->ID ) . '</a></li>';
}
$output .= '</ul>';
return $output;
}
Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks!

Answer 1

Please try this code,
<?php
$cat=1;
$yourcat = get_category($cat);
if ($yourcat)
{
echo '<h2>' . $yourcat->name . '</h2>';
}
?>
To get category name,

Answer 2

try some thing like
function get_related_author_posts() {
global $authordata, $post;
$authors_posts = get_posts( array( 'author' => $authordata->ID, 'post__not_in' => array( $post->ID ), 'posts_per_page' => 3 ) );
$output = '<ul>';
foreach ( $authors_posts as $authors_post ) {
$category = get_the_category($authors_post->ID);
foreach($category as $c){
$cat=$c->cat_name.' '.$cat;
}
$output .= '<li>' . get_the_post_thumbnail( $authors_post->ID, 'xsmall-thumb' ) . '<p>' . $cat . '</p> ' . apply_filters( 'the_title', $authors_post->post_title, $authors_post->ID ) . '</li>';
}
$output .= '</ul>';
return $output;
}
hope this work for you..