Now-Reading Tweaks

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.