Out of the box Gravatar

Sep 04, 2006

I’ve been playing with Sandbox theme and WordPress Widgets this past week. I kind of like the idea where every customization is done without touching the theme code base. By using the available WordPress API hooks, let’s play with Gravatar.

Get our hands dirty

Below is the same code that I use to add Gravatar here. If you’re going to use it, make sure to deactivate any Gravatar plugin. You can either add it to your theme functions.php or add it as a plugin.

function gravatar($string) {
	global $comment;

	$email = $comment->comment_author_email;
	$size = 32;
	$default = get_template_directory_uri() .'/images/gravatar.png';
	$gravatar = 'http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id='.md5($email).'&size='.$size.'&default='.urlencode($default);

	if ( get_comment_type() == "comment" ) {
		if ( $comment->comment_author_url ) {
			$pattern = "/(<a(.*?)href='([^']*.)' rel='external nofollow'>(.+?)<\/a>)/ie";
			$replacement = '("<span class=\"vcard\"><img class=\"gravatar photo\" src=\"$gravatar\" alt=\"\" /> <a class=\"url fn n\"\2href=\"\3\" rel=\"external nofollow\" title=\"Visit \4 website\">\4</a></span>")';
		} else {
			$pattern = "/(([^']*.))/ie";
			$replacement = '("<img class=\"gravatar\" src=\"$gravatar\" alt=\"\" /> \2")';
		}
		return preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);
	} else {
		return $string;
	}
}

By using PHP preg_replace, I create a pattern that match the original output of comment_author_link and then hook it with a new replacement using Filters.

if ( !is_admin() )
	add_filter('get_comment_author_link', 'gravatar');

Basically, you don’t have to insert or modify anything to your comments.php template.
The default gravatar image resides inside folder images as gravatar.png. Usually the Gravatar image is placed on the left of comment author name.