Kae Verens

Mostly, everything in the integration of wordpress and Donncha’s Smarty code had already been done – i just needed to figure out why little errors were creeping in.
The first I tackled was one where posts appeared with mangled titles on the front site. After a bit of grepping, I found that it was the template command {the_category} that was screwing up.
An example of the screw up was:
<a href="?cat=0" http://verens.com/index.php?cat="1&quot;" title="Category: &lt;a href=">General</a>"&gt;[<a href="http://verens.com/index.php?cat=1" title="View all posts in General">General</a>]
That one, while it took some time to find the cause, was a cinch to fix – simply delete everything in the wp-blogs/main/templates_c/ directory! Next time you view the page it’ll be much better…
…but not perfect – what appears as {the_author} in the template was displayed as “kaekae” in the front – the username doubled. A bit of code-searching and testing revealed that the_author() was returning ‘kaekae’ via $authordata->user_nickname.
I thought I had it when I tracked it down to get_userdata() in wp-include/functions.php, but a bit of testing revealed that the if conditional never became true – for some reason $cache_userdata[$userid] was not empty.
After much frustration, I finally noticed that the second parameter of the_author() was $echo = true, which triggered an echo of the user id in that function, doubling the output as the call from the template also printed it to screen.
I changed the true to false, then went looking for calls to that function to make sure they worked fine.
In wp-atom.php, wp.php and wp-rdf.php, I changed instances of <?php the_author() ?> to <?php echo the_author() ?>, and removed the second parameter and associated code from the function.
It is my considered opinion that the second parameter was a stupid idea which merely saved a few bytes of typing by the programmers. It is always a bad idea to directly echo a function’s return value from within that function, unless that is the purpose of the function.