Getting a field from the user profile showing in the comments

This is a snippet to lay the ground for showing some profile fields in comments in a phptemplate theme. Paste it into the top of comment.tpl.php in your theme. That might be the one in the phptemplate directory. Then write the code that shows the profile fields you want as outlined below.

You can get a formatted profile field by calling

profile_view_field($commentator, $field['profile_fieldname']);

The title from admin->settings->profile is available in

$field['profile_fieldname']->title

By using the title member variable you only have to update in admin -> settings -> profile to have the change reflected here. The variable $have_profile will tell you whether the current comment has a registered user associated with it and one or more profile fields are succesfully loaded. The $commentator variable contains the user object and the $fields array contains all fields defined in admin->settings->profile.

Example:

if ($have_profile) {
  // enclose in div. For instance, this could be left aligned
  // right before the $content is shown
  print '<div>';

  // Get the formatted fields to show
  $birthday = profile_view_field($commentator, $fields['profile_birthday']);
  $homepage = profile_view_field($commentator, $fields['profile_homepage']);

  // Show birthday if present
  if ($birthday) {
    print '<b>'.$fields['profile_birthday']->title.':</b> ';
    print $birthday;
    print '<br />'; // a break if it fits your theme
  }

  // Show example homepage link. We'll use our own title here
  if ($homepage) {
    print '<b>Commentators homepage:</b> ';
    print $homepage;
  }

  print '</div>';
}

Note that the code will refuse to show private fields by default.

It should be noted this chunk of code does use some resources as it loads the commentators user object on each comment rendering, and a better approach performancewise would be to change comment.module. Also, I suppose many don't like this mixture of logic and presentation. Personally, I don't think it's such a big deal here.

Here is the code to paste on top of comment.tpl.php

if ($GLOBALS['profile_hack_initialized'] !== true) {
    // Initialization of hack
    // For performance reasons we get the field definitions here, as it
    // is not needed for every comment.
    // @see profile_view_profile
    $GLOBALS['profile_hack_fields'] = array();
    if (module_exist('profile')) {
      $result = db_query("SELECT * FROM {profile_fields} WHERE visibility != %d", PROFILE_PRIVATE);
      // put each field as an object into the $fields array
      while ($field = db_fetch_object($result)) {
          $GLOBALS['profile_hack_fields'][$field->name] = $field;
      }
    }
    $GLOBALS['profile_hack_initialized'] = true;
}
$fields =& $GLOBALS['profile_hack_fields'];

// If there are field definitions and a user associated with the comment, set
// a flag that profile fields are ready to be shown. It is determined by
// checking if the commentators user object and some field definitions is
// succesfully loaded.
$have_profile = ((count($fields) > 0) and ($commentator = user_load(array('uid' => $comment->uid)))) ? true :  false;

Final note: Updated the code, use current version please.