Raw (unlinked) ouput of $name variable I'm using &lt;?php print $name; ?&gt; in node--front.tpl.php for an exceptional case, where I can't use Views and the output goodies Views has to offer. By default $name output is themed to link to author profile. 

Is there anyway to output the author name in raw text, without going throught a preprocess function?
The entire node object is available as $node so you should be able to do something like:

$author=user_load($node-&gt;uid);
print check_plain($author-&gt;name); // reasonably safe given the 'Spaces are allowed; punctuation is not allowed except for periods, hyphens, apostrophes, and underscores.' validation upon registration but let's check_plain() it anyway


or 

$author=user_load($node-&gt;uid);
print check_plain(format_username($author));


if you have modules installed that modify the display of the user name.