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Plugin Description
Ravatars is a plugin that will generate and assign icons to the visitors leaving comments at your site. The icons are based on email,
so a given visitor will get the same icon each time they comment. It is easy to customize the avatars so that they match your site’s topic or theme. It also makes comment threads easier to follow when people have memorable “faces.”
This plugin is based on Shamus Young’s Wavatars plugin.
And a shout out to Gregory Weir for bugfixes. Thanks!
Features:
- You can customize the avatars your site will display to match your theme. Just upload source images to the
wp-content/plugins/ravatars/parts directory. Ravatars will create your custom avatars by choosing a random image and then cropping a random
part of the image
- The icons are generated on-the-fly. You can adjust the desired size of the icons.
- Easily integrates with avatar enabled themes
- For easy deployment in WordPress pre 2.5, icons will automatically precede the commenter’s name. You can set HTML to come directly before and after the
icon (to put it inside of a <DIV> tag, for example) or you can control the placement of the icons manually if you don’t mind adding
a single line of PHP to your theme.
- The same email will result in the same Ravatar every time, assuming that the source images don’t change the same. If you want avatars that are unique to your site, all you need to do is change the source images.
- This plugin also supports Gravatars. If you like, it can show the Gravatar for a given user
(if available) and fall back on their Ravatar only if they don’t have a Gravatar set up. This means users can choose to set up a unique
icon for themselves, and if they don’t, they will be assigned a unique Ravatar. It’s a system that lets people personalize if
they want, yet still provide a decent icon for the lazy or apathetic.
Revision History
Version 1.0.1
Advanced Tricks
If you get a memory error
Image manipulation functions are very memory intensive. If you get a memory error, try reducing the size of your source images by lowering the resolution or cropping them into smaller parts. You can also increase PHP’s memory_limit.
Using ravatar_show ()
If you place Ravatars by calling ravatar_show () manually, note that you can also specify an optional “size” argument to override the
default. For example:
ravatar_show($comment->comment_author_email, '160');
This would cause the Ravatar to be 160×160 pixels, even if the default was set to some other value. You could do this to make admin icons
larger, for example.
Using ravatar_get ()
If ravatar_show () STILL doesn’t give you enough control, you can call:
ravatar_get(email, size);
And it will return the URL to the created image without writing anything to the page.
Random Ravatar Field
Put this code in your theme:
for ($i = 0; $i < 100; $i++)
ravatar_show ($i);
It will generate a field of 100 random ravatars, which is cool. This is how I generated the ravatar screenshot. It’s also a great way to quickly
test your source images.
Screenshots
A random selection of Ravatars using the default source images. When choosing your own images, you may want to pick only images of certian colors that match your theme. Or you may want to use only nature shots if you have a blog about hiking. Also take a look at my site grok-code.com for an example of Ravatars that can be created from a different set of source images.
