An archive for every drupal user

I've been a drupal site user/admin for over a year and have found all kinds of great things to use it for. Just upgraded my site to 4.5.2 and I have to say it doesn't leave me wanting for much. There are a few things I wish it could do so I figured it was about time to roll up my sleves and dive in...

The first thing I am attempting to do is to make the archive.module block and page blogcentric - that is to say context sensitive to the currently displayed blog. I've managed to hack archive.module using some keen xtreme programming methodology (read: 5 nights trial and error) and have actually got it to work - however it's pretty ugly. I'd like to a) clean up the code using more drupalese syntax b) perhaps port to a seperate module as that seems the way to do things properly 'round here

1) Ok so the first thing I did was put !^blog\/([0-9]*)! into the block path for archive (neat trick that) so the calendar only shows up on the blog pages.

2) Next, in the archive_calendar function I added a preg_match to hack out the user id of the current blog from $_GET['q'] like this:

// get the users uid from the url
preg_match("/^blog\/([0-9]*)/",$_GET['q'],$blog_uid);

I didn't like this much but I couldn't figure out how to get at the $uid variable or the $node->$uid attribute from the archive module. Is there a better way to do this than what I have above?

3) from there it is a simple matter of changing the SQL to include a peek at the n.uid so as to pull out only nodes for the current blog's user

$result = db_query('SELECT DISTINCT(n.nid), n.created FROM {node} n '. node_access_join_sql() .'
WHERE n.uid = %d AND n.status = 1 AND n.created > %d AND n.created < %d AND '. node_access_where_sql() .'
ORDER BY n.created', $blog_uid[1], $start_of_month, $end_of_month);

4) last thing for the _block part was to add the current blog's uid to the hyperlink to the archives page for each of the matches in the calendar

if (in_array($nday, $days_with_posts)) {
$daytext = l($nday, "archive/$year/$month/$nday/&bloguser=$blog_uid[1]");
$dayclass = 'day-link';
}

I didn't much like this either - I would have prefered just putting it at the end after a / like 2004/27/01/$uid but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how the date was being parsed into $year /$month /$day and how I could access another variable that way? I'm assuming it has something to do with one of the parse_url() functions but i couldn't find where the callback was for doing it for the date? Could somewhere point me in the right direction to make this better?

5) caveat #1 - I commented out all the lines that cache the calendar block - obviously or it would never change one blog to another - since the calendar is only being displayed for blog pages i figured the hit would be minimal - unless someone has another way of selectively cache the block for each uid?

I think that's enough to start with for now - I did get the archive page to work by adding a field to the form with a drop down of all users, and just default selecting the current user using the $_GET['bloguser'] variable i created in step 4.

If anyone has any pointers or suggestions I would certainly appreciate it...