Those of you who have been involved in the blog-oh-sphere for a while might remember the turmoil that surrounded the previous incarnation of Gravatars. When Gravatars (Globally Recognized Avatars) first came out they were all the rage and their usage caught on like wildfire. Everyone who was anyone was displaying commenter’s Gravatars on their blog.
Unfortunately the server which was hosting and serving all the millions of Gravatars couldn’t stand under the stress of so much traffic, so the Gravatar site went down for an undetermined period of time. As a result the vast majority of bloggers took Gravatar functionality off their blogs due to EXTREME lag in Gravatar loading time.
Several months ago the Gravatar site, like a Phoenix from the flames, came back online. This time it was reportedly equipped with a more powerful server among myriad other enhancements; it was ready to serve the world all the Gravatars they could ever need. Still, many people remained skeptical, myself included.
Now, after watching how things have been developing and seeing that Gravatar.com is indeed living up to the expectations, serving the public with great efficiency, I’ve decided to reintroduce Gravatars back into the comments section of each post.
The last time I had Gravatars on openswitch was when I was using WordPress as a CMS. Now I’m using Textpattern and I had to do a little research to figure out how to include Gravatars in the comments.
Looking at the implementation section of the Gravatar website I was initially discouraged.
Unfortunately, a plugin cannot be written for TextPattern at this time. TextPattern’s plugin support for comment manipulation is non-existant, and we must therefor rely on the following hack. Even if you don’t know PHP, this hack is easy to implement and only requires the addition of a single line of code to a single file. —source
I was bummed. So I did a little searching on the Textpattern Resources web page. Much to my elation I found that the Gravatar site was indeed sorely mistaken. That as of a couple releases ago TXP did indeed have the necessary hooks to create a Gravatar plugin. After a little more Googling I found that the preferred Gravatar plugin for Textpattern is glx_gravatar.
I installed it, threw a piece of code in my comments form: <txp:glx_gravatar /> and bing! I had Gravatars again, no hacking necessary.
So now if you don’t have a Gravatar you need to go get one! Oh yeah, did I mention that it’s free?
