What is a more elegant solution to these nested if/elseif statements?

Question

I\'m building a website that contains users with user profiles. Many of the fields in the profile are optional.

There is an opportunity for a lot of user-generate

Answer 1

It is not much, but because $name it is at least NULL:

public function nameify($names = NULL) {
    $name = 'NULL';
    if (!empty($names)) {
        if (!empty($names['display_name'])) {
            $name = $names['display_name'];
        } elseif (!empty($names['first_name'])) {
            $name = $names['first_name'];
            if (!empty($names['last_name'])) {
                $name .= ' ' . $names['last_name'];
            }
        } elseif (!empty($names['last_name'])) {
            $name = $names['last_name'];
        }

        if ($name=='NULL' && !empty($names['id'])) {
            $name = 'user' . $names['id'];
        } 
    } 
    return $name;
}