The Zend Developer Zone has posted the second part of a series from Vikram Vaswani about using the Stack Exchange API to pull questions and comments users have posted to the site. In this second part of the series he shows how to get more information about those users and their activities.

The thing to remember about questions, answers and comments, though, is that they don't exist in a vacuum. They're created by users, and it's the users that make the site tick. That's why the Stack Exchange API includes a large number of methods designed to let developers access user profiles and timelines, and unearth the relationships between users and their posts. This article will focus primarily on this dimension of the Stack Exchange API, illustrating how to search for users, obtain user profiles and timelines, and retrieve information on a user's questions, answers, comments, badges and tags.

You'll need to get the StackPHP PEAR package to follow along with the code examples (it does some of the hard work for you). He shows how to:

• Grab a list of users ordered by reputation
• Search for usernames matching a string
• Get badge information (in general and for a user)
• Finding a user's activity timeline

Near the end he also includes an example of using the Zend_Paginator component of the Zend Framework to filter down the results to a more manageable size.