Is there a URL I can throw the userid in and get the username?

Question

In different scenarios - especially when developping plugins - I find myself going to phpmyadmin, qa_users, searching the userid to get the username (the "handle").

It would be great to have a URL to get the userprofile immediately.

So additionally to: http://www.question2answer.org/qa/user/Scott

it would be great to have: http://www.question2answer.org/qa/userid/101

Who cares as well about that?

Answer 1

Personally I would prefer user URLs of the form www.question2answer.org/qa/user/101/scott

The main advantage IMO is when a user changes their username you don't end up with a 404, the new URL would be /user/101/scott-new-name

Just like questions the userid would be looked up so /101/scott-new-name and /101/scott can both return the user page (with a canonical).

 

Anyway, not really an answer to your question, but just my thoughts on the issue.

Comments

it is actually a good one! For my forum, though, I do not allow users to change names... :)

PS offtopic: Have you checked my "issues" / ideas for your plugin, thinking of "list all comments" and "prevent overwrites of edit history":
https://github.com/svivian/q2a-user-activity-plus
https://github.com/svivian/q2a-edit-history/issues/11

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Maybe you want to implement the profile page as URL "./users/userid/handle" in q2a v1.7 or v1.8.

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Yes that may happen, but we need to be careful of backward compatibility.

By the way, not sure if this answers your original question, but there is a function to get the username from an ID, check the docs.

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Hi Scott, hope you can implement the change of the user URL in 1.7 or 1.8. It would help a lot, esp. coding becomes easier, as we thrown in only the userid (like with the questions) and get the page, does not matter what handle is assigend in the url. I love this with the questions, e.g. http://www.question2answer.org/qa/19419/ (without the seo additions), same should work for user URLs. Looking forward to it!

Answer 2

You immediately find in the docs the way handle to userid:

qa_handle_to_userid($handle) returns the userid for the user identified by $handle or null if no user matches. This requires Q2A 1.6+, but see also qa_handles_to_userids(...) and qa_userids_to_handles(...) which were added in Q2A 1.5.

http://www.question2answer.org/functions.php

With v1.6 there was a new function implemented for userid to handle:

function qa_userid_to_handle($userid)

which is not yet in the docs.