Author Pane
Important support note: The holidays are over but I'm still too swamped to pay much attention to the queue. I'll try to work in some time to tend to it but bug reports will get first priority. It may be some time before I'm able to answer non-trivial support requests.
Author Pane is a block of information about a given user, like those typically found on a forum post, but can be used in other places as well. From core, it collects the user picture, name, join date, online status, contact link, and profile information. In addition, any module or theme can feed it more information via the preprocess system. All of this information is then gathered and displayed using a template file.
Advanced Forum and Advanced Profile Kit will use Author Pane automatically. It can also be used independently of those modules by making use of the provided block, the theme function, or the panels integration. See the documentation for more details.
Note: I am in the process of upgrading the docs in the handbook to the 2.x version of AP, which means they won't match what you need for 1.x. If you are new to AP and installing 1.x, you can either use the readme.txt of click on the revisions tab of the handbook pages to look back to the old version.
Module integrations:
The following modules will automatically add information to Author Pane when enabled. Some of these integrations are included in the Author Pane project while others are included in the individual projects. More integrations can be added as explained here.
- Buddylist (D5 only)
- Contact
- Facebook-style Statuses (Integration code in Facebook-style Statuses module)
- Fast Toggle
- Flag friend (Integration code in Flag friend module)
- Location (Contributed by user and not tested, used, or supported by me)
- Organic Groups
- Privatemsg (Integration code in Privatemsg module for D6. Included in AP dev snapshot for D5)
- Profile
- Troll (D6 only. Contributed by user and not tested, used, or supported by me)
- User Badges
- User Relationships (D6 only)
- User Stats (Integration code in User Stats module)
- User Titles
- Userpoints
Versions
5.x: is no longer supported. Unless a security issue is found, it won't be getting any changes.
6.x - 1.x: is finished and won't be getting any new features. There will only be a new release if a security issue or serious bug is found. It will be replaced by 2.x once 2.0 is released.
6.x - 2.x: has significant changes from 1.x, including a change in the theme call which means it is not backwards compatible. Now that APK beta 2 is out and makes use of this version, my focus will be on getting a beta version out ASAP so folks aren't relying on my often buggy dev version.
