Club Drupal

CONTENTS OF THIS FILE

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 * Introduction

 * Installation

 * Usage

INTRODUCTION

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Author Pane (http://drupal.org/project/author_pane) provides information about the author

of a node, comment, or page. From core, it collects the user picture, name, join

date, online status, contact link, and profile information. In addition, it gathers data

from many user related contributed modules and puts it together in a modifiable template

file.

INSTALLATION

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1. Copy the entire author_pane module directory into your normal directory for modules,

   usually sites/all/modules.

2. Enable the Author Pane module in ?q=admin/build/modules.

USAGE

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Advanced Forum:

If you have Advanced Forum installed, it will make use of Author Pane automatically on

forum posts. Advanced Forum provides its own Author Pane template and CSS so it can be

styled specifically for use in the forums.

Advanced Profile Kit:

If you have Advanced Profile Kit installed, it will make use of Author Pane automatically

on the default user page variant. Advanced Profile Kit provides its own Author Pane

template so it can be styled specifically for use on profile pages. Please note that if

you remove and re-add the Author Pane content type, you will need to edit the pane

settings and put "advanced_profile" back in the "Caller" field.

CTools content pane:

If you have Page Manager (from CTools) installed, you can add the Author Pane content

pane to any page variant. It requires the user context. You can choose an imagecache

preset to use for the user picture. You can also use the "caller" field to give this

instance a unique ID that can be accessed from the preprocess functions and the template

file.

Block:

There is an Author Pane block provided that you can enable. The block will show up on

user/NN, blog/NN, and node/NN where the node type is one that you allow in the block

config. If you want to exclude it from one of those page types, use the core block

visibility option. Exclusion of the /edit page happens automatically. 

The block is disabled by default and must be enabled. Further options are available by

configuring the block:

* Node types to display on - Check on which node types the block should be shown. The

  block will show in the region it is placed, not literally on the node, and only on

  full node view pages. (ie: node/42 not when the node is part of a view)

* User picture preset - This is the Imagecache preset that will be used to format the

  user picture. Leave blank to show the full sized picture. Requires Imagecache module.

Theme function:

You can call the theme function directly and print the author pane anywhere in your code.

You must have a fully loaded user object to pass into the function. The rest of the

parameters are optional.

<?php

print theme('author_pane', $account, $caller, $picture_preset, $context, $disable_css);

?>

Parameters:

$account - The fully loaded user object. If all you have is a UID, you can get the object

with $account = user_load($uid); where $uid is a variable holding the user id.

$caller - (optional) This is an ID you can pass in as a way to track who is calling the

function. If you use Author Pane on your user profiles, on your blog pages, and in your

forums, you may want to display slightly different information in each Author Pane. By

passing in the caller, you can tell from within the preprocess functions where this is

going to be displayed.

$picture_preset - (optional) This is an imagecache picture preset that, if given, and

if imagecache is enabled, will be used to size the user picture on the author pane.

$context - (optional) This is usually a node or comment object and gives the context of

where the Author Pane has been placed so information from that context is available to

the template and preprocesses.

$disable_css - (optional) Because the Author Pane preprocess gets called after the code

that calls it, the Author Pane CSS file will be loaded last and clobber any earlier CSS.

This option tells Author Pane not to load its CSS so it uses the CSS of the caller. This

is mainly intended for Advanced Forum because the styles include Author Pane styling but

can be used for custom purposes as well.