Print the node author's full name on a custom node template I have a content type "Blog entry" which I have overridden the template. (node--blog_entry.tpl.php)

The target is to display the node author's full name (as a link) which will take the user to a page (produced by a view) which shows all the other articles they have written.

In my template file, I have the following code:

 function bootstrap_mysite_preprocess_node(&amp;$vars) {
   $vars['author_name'] = $vars['name'];
   $vars['submitted_dt'] = format_date($vars['node']-&gt;created, 'custom', 'jS F Y');
 }


The view that I have created which shows the author's other articles takes the UserID as an argument, so what I need is to display a link which which shows the author's full name, but passes their UserID.

the code I have in my custom content template is:

&lt;div class="author-name"&gt;
    WRITTEN BY &lt;a href="/user-posts/&lt;?php print $uid; ?&gt;"&gt; &lt;?php print $author_name; ?&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;


But author name is not only the author's username (not their full name) but it is output as a link which is no good for me.  I simply want to output the author's full name as plain text.

So, to summarise - 
What can I use instead of $vars['name']; (which producesa username that links to a profile)
that will instead produce some plain text of the user's full name ?
Your question doesn't indicate whether you are storing the user's full name anywhere. You can add fields to the user profile (at /admin/config/people/accounts/fields). Suppose you add a firstname field (field_user_fname) and lastname field (field_user_lname), you could then write a custom function in your template file, like this:

function _get_author_name($uid) {
  $wrapper = entity_metadata_wrapper('user', $uid);
  $fname = $wrapper-&gt;field_user_fname-&gt;value();
  $lname = $wrapper-&gt;field_user_lname-&gt;value();
  return "$fname $lname";
}


And then, since you already know the UID, you could call the function from your content template:

&lt;div class="author-name"&gt;
    WRITTEN BY &lt;a href="/user-posts/&lt;?php print $uid; ?&gt;"&gt; 
    &lt;?php print _get_author_name($uid); ?&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;


You could also investigate the Realname module.