Lets start with a small explanation. Gravatars are so called ‘globally recognized avatars’. Basically it is an open directory for avatars. If you didn’t get one yet, feel free to head over to www.gravatar.com.
The implementation of gravatars for your site is already extremely easy. However if you are fortunate enough to be using Symfony, it becomes a real piece of cake. Quite a few people already use gravatars, including the Symfony blog. This number will probably increase quite a bit, given the recent purchase of the company by Automattic.
Gravatars are attached to an email address. Lets assume your program is already setting and getting the email addresses. All you need to get up and running with Gravatars is these simple 3 steps.
1. Extend your setEmail to do setGravatar as well
(somewhere in lib/Comment.php)
function setEmail($input) {
$this->setGravatar(md5($input));
parent::setEmail($input);
}
2. When getting the Gravatar, retrieve the full image code
(somewhere in lib/Comment.php)
function getGravatar() {
$md5email = parent::getGravatar();
$size = 45;
$rating = 'R'; // possible values [ G | PG | R | X ]
$url = '<img width='.$size.'px height='.$size.'px class="gravatar" src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id='.$md5email.'&rating='.$rating.'&size=35" alt="gravatar" />';
return $url;
}
3. In your view template
Simply do: $comment->getGravatar();
DONE!
Have a look at the result:
