[development] Improving theme('username') with inspiration from Facebook

[Mark Fredrickson]

On 8/20/07, Moshe Weitzman <weitzman at tejasa.com> wrote:
> We have a handy function, theme('username') which accepts a uid and
> name and returns a profile link. But perhaps that function should be a
> bit more expressive.

It would be nice to have the ability to hook into the rendering of
this and provide more options. E.g. I submitted a patch to buddylist
that would add a (+) to add new users to your buddylist and (-) to
remove them. For bio, we'd like to override the name with the title of
the bio node, which in many implementations might be "Firstname
Lastname".

Perhaps a better way of thinking about this is to view the problem as
rendering an entire "user" object, not just a link. Right now we
render nodes in teaser and full views, and I know Eaton is working on
more rendering contexts. Perhaps this idea overlaps with that work.

-Mark