Laravel 5 get profile name - php

Question

I'm laravel begginer and I wan't to make simple CMS. Ok, so i have simple question:
I want when click on avatar (profile image) - redirect to user profile (http://example.com/profiles/nickname/id)
In DB it saves that:
as you see author_id I have, now I need to get author name from users table:
And then generate url: http://example.com/profiles/Evaldas/2 (Evaldas, because author_id is 2 in topics table)
My routes file:
Route::get('topic/{tname}/{tid}', 'viewTopic#showTopic');
My viewTopic.php Controller:
<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use DB;
use View;
class viewTopic extends Controller
{
public function showTopic($tname, $tid)
{
return View::make('posts', [
'topics' => DB::table('topics')
->where('id', $tid)
->where('seo_title', $tname)
->first(),
'posts' => DB::table('posts')
->where('topic_id', $tid)
->select()
->get()
]);
}
}
And layout:
#extends('layouts.main')
#section('content')
<div class="media">
<div class="media-left">
<a href="HERE MUST BE HREF TO PROFILE">
<img class="media-object" src="http://localhost/uploads/avatars/2.jpg" style="width: 64px">
</a>
</div>
<div class="media-body" rel="#author{{ $topics->author_id }}">
<h4 class="media-heading">{{ $topics->title }}</h4>
#if(!empty($topics->text))
{{ $topics->text }}
#else
Message empty :(
#endif
</div>
#foreach($posts as $post)
<div class="media">
<div class="media-left">
<a href="HERE MUST BE HREF TO PROFILE">
<img class="media-object" src="http://localhost/uploads/avatars/1.png" style="width: 64px">
</a>
</div>
<div class="media-body" rel="#post{{ $post->pid }}">
{{ $post->text }}
</div>
</div>
#endforeach
</div>
#stop
Thanks in advance ;)

Answer 1

You could use the User object to look it up ... but a better option would be to join the 'posts' table to the 'user' table, and select it from the results - have a look at http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/queries#joins