CoffeeBear.net

Now-Reading Tweaks

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life, Plugins, WordPress

I use Rob Miller’s excel­lent Now-Reading plu­gin to track all the books I’ve read and am read­ing here at Cof­fee­Bear. After my recent site upgrade I decided to tweak the sin­gle book tem­plate for my library. I noticed that the lat­est ver­sion of Now-Reading allows you to note who read a given book on multi­user sites. As my wife occas­sion­ally posts here I wanted my reads to be marked as mine, but the default out­put of the func­tion Rob imple­mented only dis­plays the user’s login name. Seri­ously Rob, what were you think­ing? If you did not want to give end users the option to select how they want their name to print out why wouldn’t you go with display_name?

I looked at the code Rob used and with a lit­tle help from the Prac­ti­cal PHP I hacked together my own func­tion based on Rob’s. By default print_reader2 works the exactly the same as print_reader¹ but by feed­ing it an addi­tional para­me­ter, you get your choice of what to use to dis­play as reader’s name:

• 0: Prints out the user_login aka the user­name you use to log into WordPress.
• 1: Prints user_nicename, appears to sim­ply be an all lower case ver­sion of the user’s nick­name².
• 2: Prints display_name, from the “Dis­play name pub­licly as” field in your Word­Press profile.
• 3: Prints first_name, from the “First name” field in your Word­Press profile.
• 4: Prints nick­name, from the “Nick­name” field in your Word­Press profile.

function print_reader2( $echo=true, $reader_id = 0, $display = 0 ) {
	global $userdata;

	$username='';

	switch($display) {
		case "1": if (!$reader_id) { get_currentuserinfo(); $username = $userdata->user_nicename; } else { $user_info = get_userdata($reader_id); $username = $user_info->user_nicename; }; break;
		case "2": if (!$reader_id) { get_currentuserinfo(); $username = $userdata->display_name; } else { $user_info = get_userdata($reader_id); $username = $user_info->display_name; }; break;
		case "3": if (!$reader_id) { get_currentuserinfo(); $username = $userdata->first_name; } else { $user_info = get_userdata($reader_id); $username = $user_info->first_name; }; break;
		case "4": if (!$reader_id) { get_currentuserinfo(); $username = $userdata->nickname; } else { $user_info = get_userdata($reader_id); $username = $user_info->nickname; }; break;
		default: if (!$reader_id) { get_currentuserinfo(); $username = $userdata->user_login; } else { $user_info = get_userdata($reader_id); $username = $user_info->user_login;};
   }
	if ($echo)
		echo $username;
	return $username;
}

Side note: Word­Press 2.5.1 got released today and it includes a secu­rity fix, be sure to update your blogs!

¹ At least, I think it does. I’m not a pro­gram­mer and I only know enough PHP to be dan­ger­ous to myself.
² The Word­Press Codex does not appear to define what this field is used for or why it exists, so that’s just my guess.

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