WordPress Internal @ Mentions

2 comments

1. This is a little tricky because sanitize_user allows spaces in usernames, meaning it difficult to avoid grabbing the whole phrase ‘@johndoe said that … ‘ as opposed to just the actual username ‘@johndoe’ and you have no separator at the end that would help. To avoid that I imposed a requirement that spaces in the username be replaced with ‘+’.

   function look_for_author($login) {
     if (!empty($login[1])) {
       $lname = str_replace('+',' ',$login[1]);
       $user = get_user_by('login',$lname);
       if (!empty($user)) return ' <a href="'.get_author_posts_url($user->ID).'">'.$lname.'</a> ';
     }
     return ' '.$login[0].' ';
   }
   
   function hyperlink_authors( $content ){
     $content = preg_replace_callback(
       '/[s>]+@([A-Za-z0-9_.-*@+]+)[^A-Za-z0-9_.-*@+]/',
       'look_for_author',
       $content
     );
     return $content;
   }
   add_filter( 'the_content', 'hyperlink_authors', 1 );
   

   I would not expect this solution to be very robust, not without a lot of tweaking of the regex. And I think you would be better off with a shortcode, but there you go.

   Note: It occurred to me that this site has a similar mention-like functionality. When writing a comment, you can notify other users by writing “@username” but usernames here can have spaces as with WordPress. The “spaces” problem here was solved by requiring that spaces just be removed, rather than substituted with “+” signs. That could be another way to solve approach the problem.

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2. Look at the P2 theme. It does this, calling them “Mentions”.

   http://themes.svn.wordpress.org/p2/1.4.2/inc/mentions.php

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