I have recently begun developing a MU powered blogs section for my work at http://blogs.itworldcanada.com, I want to start by saying that I have found this forum and the readme monumentially helpfull in setting it up thus far.
Now to the problem,
I am using the plugin "ah_recent_posts_mu" (developed by Ron Rennick and Andrea) to list the most recent post from all pages in order to display them on the main blogs front page. At first it simply displayed the post title and blog title as links. Using that as a starting point I have developed it a little further so that it shows a summary of the posts with the lengths trimmed to a max of 200 words , author, date ...etc.
The problem is that the post_author attribute returns a number and not a display name. I am assuming that i would have to compare this number (author ID?) to the table wp_users and get the display_name value. With my limited php skill i'm not quite sure how to do this.
The next problem is more simple. I simply want to format the date output from post_date into a more reader friendly format like 9:40-Thurday, June 21, 2007 insted of 2007-06-21 09:40:11.
Looking through all the forums I notice that displaying recent post on the main blog is a very common request so once i get this thing stable enough (and talk with Ron and Andrea) I see a very usefull mu-plugin.
*Side note - not my actual problem
The reason i am using ah_recent_posts_mu instead of a site wide feed for this is because I am using subdirectories and not subdomains which seems to act wierd with rss inside my actual blogs. Ie, If i go to a subdirectory blog in FF I can subsribe to its feeds no problem via live bookmarks or other rss readers but if i go to my home page blog code and call that rss it isn't display it on the page and gives errors.
-for cleanliness I will post the code in a reply