Well, I've beat my head against the wall too long!!
The local store doesn't have the php/MYsql book that was recommended in to. So I'm here for some help.
I'm playing with a Custom Island and I want to display some user info in it.
Here's the island code:

How do I get the info and put it in where UUUU,DDDD and NNNN are?
I know it's going to be php code but I can't find any sample in looking around here and at UBBDev.

I promise this is the last "DUMMIE" question I'll ask.
I'll be ordering the book later.
Thanks for reading

Well, in my pjirc chat addon at UBBDev I use this to pull the users public display name: $user.USER_DISPLAY_NAME

So i'd think ot pull the username it'd be: $user.USER_LOGIN_NAME
And the User Number: $user.USER_ID

Doesn't work. seems like $user is undefined there. hmm.

Ahh yeh, $user would have to be defined; Rick was doing it in a header island in a demo before, I wonder what he was using...

Well, that's good to hear because I thought it was me!!!

No, it's not you. Doesn't answer your question though. I just have not figured out the answer yet.

Thanks David.
I just can't believe that with all the samples I've looked at in two days and with my past life as a programmer, I can't get it to work.
Of course, I didn't work in any of this modern stuff, just the old stuff, Fortran, assembly language, Cobol, and little C and C++ but none of it was Object Oriented stuff.
I crack it one of these days. It just ordered the book by Luke willing and Laura Thompson - php and MySQL Web Development. Should be some heavy reading for me.

Well, in this case you need to know smarty templates and how to pass variables to them for use. I've not spent any time at all with the smarty templates, hence my problem answering you.

It appears that I'm not making the $user array available to any of the portal islands. That's probably something I'll need to address in the base code, and might be able to get in for 7.1.1.

Oh, so it's NOT me? \o/