Gravatar Support for News Articles

In the most recent release of news articles, support for gravatars was enabled.

Gravatars allow a picture representation of the comment author to appear next to each comment (see live example). These pictures are centrally stored at www.gravatar.com and News Articles will access each image through the email address of the person posting the comment.

If you have a gravatar associated with your email address (e.g. you have signed up at www.gravatar.com and uploaded a picture), your unique picture will appear (see my batman avatar that appears below); otherwise there are options to automatically generate one (notice the monsters that appear on this link?).

To use a gravatar within your comment template (Comment.Item.Html), use something like:-

<img src="[GRAVATARURL]" alt="[AUTHOR]" />

The [GRAVATARURL] token is the unique url that will generate the encrypted picture link based on the email address.

If you want to automatically generate pictures for people without a gravatar, you can append the following:-

<img src="[GRAVATARURL]?d=wavatar" alt="[AUTHOR]" />

If you want to restrict the size, you can use:-

<img src="[GRAVATARURL]?s=80" alt="[AUTHOR]" />

In fact, there are many additional parameters that you can put in the url to further customize the gravatar (further documentation here).

I’ve also deliberately steered away from making too many admin options for this item and instead allowed the template author to control what is used.

I hope you find it useful!