Adding Gravatar support with PHP

Let’s assume that you have a blog and you want to add Gravatars to the comments. Basically you will need 3 things to get started. The email of the person making the comment (This can be collected from your comment form), a default Gravatar image on your server in case some people don’t have a Gravatar and finally you need to define the size of the Gravatar image you want. Here is the code you need below.

//The email of the person making the comment
$email = "cornelius@blah.com";

//A default Gravatar image to use for people without Gravatars
$default = "http://www.somewhere.com/default.jpg";

//Define the size of the Gravatar image
$size = 80;

Now you’re ready to display your Gravatar. To generate your Gravatar URL simply use the code below.

$grav_url = "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?
gravatar_id=".md5( strtolower($email) ).
"&default=".urlencode($default).
"&size=".$size;

Basic comments template

Now let’s style it up a bit to look like the comment image above. Here is a basic template to style your comments with the Gravatar included on the left.

<style>
/* Styles for comments */

.comment{border:#CCC solid 1px; padding:20px;}
.comment img{float:left: padding:0px 20px 20px 0px;}
.comment .h4{font-size:18px;}
.comment p{padding:5px 0px;}
.comment .date{font-size:10px; font-style:italic;}

</style>

<div class="comment">
    <img src="<?php echo $grav_url ?>" />
    <h4>Joe Blow</h4>
    <p class="date">Date of comment goes here</p>
    <p>The comment goes here</p>
</div>

More ways to add Gravatar support to your blog comments

• WordPress Gravatar Plugin
• Drupal Module
• Joomla Gravatar Support
• JavaScript Gravatar Implementation
• .Net Gravatar Implementation
• Java Gravatar Implementation

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