»
To reach more readers the following post is in english (Um mehr Leser zu erreichen, ist der folgende Beitrag in englisch).
What does this plugin do?
The Comvatars plugin shows avatar images like this on user comments of Wordpress blogs to uniquely identify the author of a comment much like various bulletin board systems do.
Make it quick. Where can I download it?
Download Comvatars Avatar Images 2.4 here!
How do I install the plugin?
As with the most Wordpress plugins, installation is easy:
- Dowload the Comvatars plugin and extract it to your Wordpress installation directory.
- Download the Comvatars Avatar Images and extract them to your Wordpress installation directory.
- Activate the Comvatars plugin in your Wordpress admin panel.
- Ready. It couldn’t be easier. The rest is self-explanatory.
Why is there so much text below?
Because I hate cool plugins that are badly documented. Even the smallest piece of code needs some documentation. The following text is (hopefully) pretty exhaustive and structured as FAQ. Feel free to skip the questions you are not interested in.
- I want to test it. What do I need?
- What is the difference to other similar plugins?
- How does the plugin apply avatars to comments?
- What else can I do with your plugin?
- What are the Comvatars Avatar Pools and what are they good for?
- How can I extend the Comvatars avatar pools?
- What languages are supported and how do I install the language packs?
- How does registration of avatars work?
- How to configure avatar registration?
- What do I have to consider when previously only using the Favatars plugin?
- What do I have to consider when previously only using the Gravatars plugin?
- How does the Gravatars plugin options affect the Comvatars plugin?
- Why should I use the Comvatars default implementation instead of template tags?
- What do I have to do to use Comvatars template tags?
- Which template tags are provided?
- What other functions can I use for advanced templates?
- How did you print the avatar inside a post like you did in the first answer above?
- How can I modify the appearance of the avatars?
- Which versions of the Comvatars plugin do exist and what are their features?
- Are there currently any known issues about this plugin?
- What else do I have to know?
I want to test it. What do I need?
You need the following software to be installed on your webserver:
- PHP 4.0.1. or higher
- Wordpress 1.5.1 or higher
- the Comvatars plugin
- Optional: the Comvatars Avatar Pool (later more)
- Optional: the Comvatars localization files (later more)
- Optional: the Favatars 2 plugin by Jeff Minard & Co
- Optional: the Gravatars 2.6 plugin by Skippy
The sequence of installation doesn’t matter. Feel free to only install some but not all of the optional software. For the Gravatars and Favatars plugins, follow the installation notes on their homepages. The Comvatars plugin may also work fine with other versions of the other two plugins or at least Wordpress, but wasn’t tested.
What is the difference to other similar plugins?
I am not reinventing the wheel. The Comvatars plugin combines the functionality of the Gravatars plugin by Skippy selecting avatar images from a central service on the internet and the Favatars plugin by Jeff Minard & Co taking favicons of URLs as avatar images. Additionally unlike the Gravatars and Favatars plugin, the Comvatars plugin is doing its job right after activation in the Wordpress admin panel without any additional changes to your Wordpress templates.
How does the plugin apply avatars to comments?
The Comvatars plugin not only combines the features of the above mentioned plugins, it also needs the Gravatars and Favatars plugins to be installed and activated to achieve the full functionality. You are free to run the Comvatars plugin without either one of them. In this case you only get parts of the functionality. Avatars will be applied by the following steps:
- If a comment author has registered a local avatar via the Comvatars Manager (later more on this topic), this one will be taken.
- Otherwise the Comvatars plugin choose a default avatar for the author. If the author comments on any other post the next time and provides the same name and email address as before, the same default avatar will be taken and so will clearly identify him.
- If the Favatars plugin is activated, it will be used to find out the authors avatar by loading the favicon of the URL the author may have provided in his comment. This is the so called favatar. If a favatar is found, it replaces the default avatar of the Comvatars plugin.
- Finally if the Gravatars plugin is activated it will be used to load the authors avatar from the Gravatar registration service. In case this fails the aquired default avatar of the previous steps will be displayed. If you don’t know what the Gravatar service is, just hurry and take a look at it. It’s free and besides this… it’s cool
Note, that this describes how the plugin works internally. Logically the following precedence of avatars arises from the above:
- Registered Comvatar
- Gravatar
- Favatar
- Default Comvatar
This precedence can not be changed but influenced by not activating the Favatars or Gravatars plugin at all and so skipping their avatar assignment.
What else can I do with your plugin?
The plugin provides the following additional features:
- Comvatars Wordpress admin panel for easy configuration of the plugin
- Providing avatars to your comments applied in the way described above without any additional configuration
- A set of different pools of avatars where the Comvatars plugin can chose from
- Extension or replacement of the avatar images in th pools by your own artwork
- Authors can register their own avatars out of one of the avatar pools, if they are recognized as frequent comment authors
- Managing of avatar registration is done by an easy to use management page
- Management page comes styled like the Wordpress admin pages but can easly be adopted to your own site style
- Support of template tags to easily add avatars to your Wordpress theme template at any place you want
- Avatars can be styled with CSS by refering to a set of
comvatar
classes - Inclusion of pseudo XHTML tag
in your posts to force the printing of an avatar
What are the Comvatars Avatar Pools and what are they good for?
The avatar pools are containing the artwork the Comvatars plugin can chose from. The Comvatars plugin choses avatars to display for a user from one of the different avatar pools. The location of the pools can be modified in the Comvatars admin panel. If a user does not supply an email address in his comment he posts "anonymous" in terms of the Comvatars plugin. Otherwise he is an identified user. For both types of users there is a different pool, the Comvatars plugin selects the avatar from. You also can point both pools to the same directory. In this case anonymous and identified users will take their avatars from the same pool. The default settings of the Comvatars plugin automatically point to the directories of the provided avatar pools you can download from this site.
How can I extend the Comvatars avatar pools?
To extend the amount of avatar images in the Comvatars avatar pools just drop some new images in the pool directories. The file names do not need to follow any special naming schema. The plugin will recognize the new images the next time it will execute. Please note that changing the amount of images or even their names may also change the displayed avatars for previous comment authors of your blog unless they haven’t registerd an avatar.
What languages are supported and how do I install the language packs?
If you are a user of a language other than English, you may want to show Comvatars pages in your favorite language. With a little luck, it’s listed here and ready for download. Otherwise you may provide a translation on your own and drop a line so I can add a link to the list of translations. To install the Comvatars translation files just extract the desired language archive into your Wordpress installation directory. The following languages are supported by the current version:
- English (default)
- German
How does registration of avatars work?
Frequent comment authors of your blog can be rewarded to select their own avatar from a third pool of registered user avatars. In the Comvatars Wordpress admin panel you can set an amount of comments a user at least needs to select his own avatar. If this threshold is passed, the Comvatars plugin will automatically add a link to the registration manager at the foot of the comment form for this user. By using the appropriate template tag, you gain more control over the position the link will be included in your theme template.
The user will have to confirm his avatar selection by answering a special confirmation email the blog will send after the avatar selection. A registered avatar will not be taken for any other user of your blog. Vice versa a user can only register unregistered avatars. To not use up all available avatars for registration, you can set a minimum limit for the amount of unregistered avatars in the Comvatars admin panel.
How to configure avatar registration?
The registration manager normally displays the avatar settings for a selected user. Wordpress blog users with a configurable level can also access a search mask on the registration manager page, requesting the avatar status of any user. This also includes selection of avatars for this user. Nevertheless the user still has to confirm the confirmation email.
What do I have to consider when previously only using the Favatars plugin?
If you want to use the Comvatars default implementation, just delete the Favatars comment_favicon()
template tags from your templates. If you still prefer using template tags instead of the Comvatars default implementation replace the Favatars comment_favicon()
template tags to the Comvatars comvatar_image()
template tag and turn the default implementation off in the Comvatars Wordpress admin panel. Please note that both template tags aren’t interface compatible in case you have used parameters with the comment_favicon()
tag. Nevertheless with comvatar_image()
you can achieve the same functionality as with comment_favicon()
by arranging the parameters differently.
What do I have to consider when previously only using the Gravatars plugin?
If you want to use the Comvatars default implementation, just delete the Gravatars gravatar()
template tags from your templates. If you still prefer using template tags instead of the Comvatars default implementation replace the Gravatars gravatar()
template tags to the Comvatars comvatar_url()
template tag and turn the default implementation off in the Comvatars Wordpress admin panel. Both template tags are interface compatible but comvatar_url()
takes some additional optional parameters.
How does the Gravatars plugin options affect the Comvatars plugin?
If the Gravatars plugin is activated, then the Comvatars plugin will interoperate with its settings in the following way
- The default gravatar rating will still apply
- The default gravatar size will only be applied to the gravatar images
- The Gravatars cache will be turned off
- The local gravatars option will be turned off
- The border color option will be ignored
- The default gravatar image path will be ignored
Why should I use the Comvatars default implementation instead of template tags?
In short, it’s easier. The Comvatars default implementation may not be as flexible as template tags but it doesn’t need any further configuration to the involved plugins or your templates. It’s working right out of the box after activating the Comvatars plugin. This works great with the default Wordpress 1.5 theme (also known as Kubrick), but may be a little tiny. If you wish to have more control over the layout, you should deactivate the default implementation in the Comvatars Wordpress admin panel.
What do I have to do to use Comvatars template tags?
You can use template tags in your template right after installation but in that case you may want to turn off Comvatars default implementation in the Comvatars Wordpress admin panel which is active by default.
Which template tags are provided?
- Returns an URL to an avatar image in all cases, either to a default one, favatar or gravatar.
- name: (mixed) If empty, it will try to take the user information from the current comment. If no comment is processed at this time, the user name will be set to the localized text of Anonymous, the user email and user URL will be left blank. If name is set as string and is validated as, URL the address will be taken to receive the favatar from this URL. If name is set as string and is validated as email address, the address will be taken to receive the gravatar from the Gravatar service. If name is an array, it is expected to contain the user name in element 0, the users email address in element 1 and the users URL in element 2. Otherwise the name will be used to select a Comvatar.
- default_avatar_url: (string) If set and no user name or user email is found valid or the script runs into an error this avatar will be displayed. The URL must be complete including ‘http://’. This is not checked. If it is empty, the plugin chooses an default avatar from one of the pools image from the plugin folder.
- icon_size: (integer) If set and the Gravatars plugin is activated, it will override the Gravatars setting for this image and requests the image in the specified size from the gravatar service.
- display: (boolean) If true, the resulting output will be printed at the position in the template where the tag is used and no value will be returned. If display is false, no output will be printed but the resulting string will be given back to the caller.
- Returns an HTML
tag of an avatar image in all cases, either of a default one, favatar or gravatar. XHTML compliant.
- The function parameter for the comvatar_image template tag are the same as the parameter for comvatar_url template tag. See the above function comvatar_url for an explanation of the parameter. Additionally the following parameter are defined:
-
class_name: (string) If set the default CSS class for th
tag will overridden to the one defined in this parameter.
- Returns an HTML tag with a link to the users homepage and an embedded avatar image if a user url could be found in all cases, either of a default one, favatar or gravatar. XHTML compliant.
- The function parameter for the comvatar_image_link template tag are the same as the parameter for comvatar_image template tag. See the above function comvatar_url for an explanation of the parameter.
What other functions can I use for advanced templates?
- Shows a link to registration manager for the current user
- Displays the Registration Manager. Included inside a page, you are able to use your own style instead of the admin interface style
How did you print the avatar inside a post like you did in the first answer above?
To print an avatar inside your blog posts, you don’t use template tags but HTML comment tags, these are replaced by the Comvatars plugin. Just type in your posts and this will be replaced by the avatar image. The
ATTRIBUTES
are of the same nature as in the template tags described above. The same behaviour applies here. Attributes are defined in the same way as (X)HTML attributes: NAME="VALUE"
. The following attributes are available:
- name: If empty, or not defined and no user, email or url attribute is set, it will try to take the user information from the current comment. If no comment is processed at this time, the user name will be set to the localized text of Anonymous, the user email and user URL will be left blank. If name is set as string and is validated as, URL the address will be taken to receive the favatar from this URL. If name is set as string and is validated as email address, the address will be taken to receive the gravatar from the Gravatar service. Otherwise the name will be used to select a Comvatar. This attribute is mutual exclusive to the attributes user, email, url.
- user: The name of the user. This will be used for Comvatars base functionality. This attribute is mutual exclusive to the attributes name.
- email: The email of a user. This will be used for Gravatars functionality. This attribute is mutual exclusive to the attributes name.
- url: The url of a user. This will be used for Favatars functionality. This attribute is mutual exclusive to the attributes name.
-
size: The size of the returned Gravatar(!) image. This overrides the settings in the Gravatar admin panel. Because favicons, comvatars and gravatars can all be of different size no width or height attribute will be given to the
tag.
- default: The default url to the avatar that should be displayed if all else fails. If set, the Comvatars functionality of selecting an avatar is overridden.
-
class: (string) If set the default CSS class for the
tag will overridden to the one defined in this parameter.
How can I modify the appearance of the avatars?
Best practice is to modify the style.css
file of your active theme and add a new entry:
img.comvatar {
/* just an example configuration */
border: 1px solid #000;
background: #fff;
}
The Gravatars setting size can be overridden by a CSS style. Also use CSS to achieve a border. Remember when displaying a Favatars image, the original resolution is almost every time 16×16 pixel due to the .ico format of the image. So streching it to a size of e.g. 80×80 pixel with CSS may make it look coarse.
Are there currently any known issues about this plugin?
Currently it is not known of any bug in the Comvatars plugin.
Which versions of the Comvatars plugin do exist and what are their features?
-
2005-08-07 Version 1.0
- Feature: Providing avatars to your comments without any additional configuration (in case you haven’t used Gravatars and/or Favatars exentsively before)
- Feature: Support of template tags to easily add avatars to your Wordpress theme template
- Feature: If no avatar could be found, then the author hasn’t provided any name, email and URL and a default avatar for anonymous comments will be used
- Feature: You are free to extend or replace the default avatar collection by your own images
- Feature: If the Gravatars plugin is activated, its related settings will be used to configure the Comvatars plugin
- Feature: Avatars can be styled with CSS by refering to the
comvatar
class - Feature: You can include
tags in your posts to force the printing of an avatar (that’s how the avatar in the first answer is printed)
-
2005-08-08 Version 1.1
- Bugfix: Fixing a typo in the “height” attribute of the produced
tag
- Change: Changing the tags to use inside your posts to a HTML comment syntax of
to not mess up (X)HTML validation in case the plugin is turned off
- Bugfix: Fixing a typo in the “height” attribute of the produced
-
2005-08-10 Version 1.2
- Bugfix: Fixing display of Gravatar in Wordpress admin panel
-
2005-08-11 Version 1.3
- Feature: Retrieving favatars for new comments even if the URL is redirected. This will not work if you “favatise” your blog. This new way may slow down your blog if you extensivley use tags with http addresses as parameter.
-
2005-08-15 Version 1.4
- Bugfix: Now the plugin runs with PHP4, too (thanks to Gunnar)
-
2005-09-04 Version 1.5
- Bugfix: Collection path settings of the Gravatars plugin wasn’t used
- Bugfix: Now using WP path settings instead of detecting them by ourself (thanks to Jason Penney)
-
2005-09-20 Version 2.0: Plugin - German translation - Avatars
- Feature: Admin panel
- Feature: Registration Manager page
- Feature: Avatar registration for frequent comment authors
- Feature: Localization support
- Bugfix: Using Favatar-Redirection not always retrieved the favicon location
- Change: Interaction with Gravatars plugin loosened
- Change: No width and height attributes anymore at the retrieved avatar
tags
- Change: Changing parameter of comvatar_image()
- Change: Using (X)HTML attribute syntax on <–comvatar –> tag
- Change: The CSS class “comvatar” now applies to the
tag as also to the tag it is embedded in
- Change: Note that since now the pool images must be downloaded separately
-
2005-09-25 Version 2.1: Plugin - German translation - Avatars
- Feature: New pool for registered users
- Feature: After changing the path for registered avatars, all already registered avatar pathes will be fixed
- Bugfix: In PHP 4 the template tag
show_registration_manager_link()
could be used more than once - Bugfix: Typo caused anonymous avatars not to work properly
-
2005-10-16 Version 2.2: Intermediate version, not official
- Bugfix: Fixing problems with hardcoded URLs when using mod_rewrite
-
2005-11-15 Version 2.3: Plugin - German translation - Avatars
- Feature: Adding new option to allow user to use the native size of an avatar when using default implementation
- Feature: Admin now can see who has registered a specific avatar
- 2005-12-06 Version 2.4: Plugin - German translation - Avatars
What else do I have to know?
There’s a lot! Did you know that in a group of 23 people, at least two have the same birthday with the probability greater than 50%? Most of the world’s opals are mined at Coober Pedy and Andamooka in South Australia? Or even that during the Phony War (September 1939-February 1940) in WWII all poisonous snakes were killed at the London Zoo, to prevent these snakes to escape during a bombing raid? I bet you didn’t
For the curious: A complete list of plugins running this blog can be found here.
For the daring: A complete list of plugins I had written for Wordpress can be found here.
»
»
«
» Das walte Shelby » “Gravatars-Addendum” plugin:
[…] Update 2005-06-08: This plugin is still downloadable but further development is now abandoned. Take a look at its successor, the Comvatars plugin, for a much improved functionality. […]
» clint:
wow, theres a good amount of stuff to digest here, great documentation.
» ]V[orlock Zernebock:
With Comvatars activated I cannot modify Gravatars options (cache avatars, etc.). It’s a bug or it’s only me?
» Sören:
No, it’s not a bug. It’s a feature. As written above in How does the Gravatars plugin options affect the Comvatars plugin?, the Comvatars plugin sets (and keeps) some of the Gravatars options, this is mainly to avoid misconfiguration during setup. If this is a problem for you, like slowing down the loading time of your site or breaks some other things on your site, let me know. I’ll see what I can do.
» ]V[orlock Zernebock:
Oh, sorry, I had to read carefully before posting ^_^*
» Sören:
;)
» J4P4N’s virtual world » neues cooles Plugin in Verwendung:
[…] Ab sofort läuft hier ein neues Plugin: “Comvatars” Bei Leuten, die einen Gravatar haben, wird dieser neben dem Kommentar angezeigt, wenn ein User noch keinen Gravatar hat, wird versucht, das Favicon seiner Homepage anzuzeigen. […]
» Jason Penney:
Great Plugin!
I had the following issues trying to install this:
comvatars builds the collection list before reading the gravatar settings, making changing the collection location in gravatar not work. An easy fix was to move the section marked “// read collection” below the section marked “// fix gravatar options”.
It can’t handle wordpress being installed in a directory that lists differntly under the web server than under the actual system. For example if your collection would be found by a web browser in /~username/blog/wp-content/comvatars/collectionl, but is located on the drive at a path like /homes/home3/u/username/public_html/wp-content/comvatars/collection/ things don’t seem to work. I moved my comvatars collection under /var/www/html for now, but I would like to place them back with my blog files.
Jay
» Sören:
Hi Jay,
thanks for reporting these two bugs. You were completly right. Hopefully they are both fixed with the version 1.5. Sorrowly I could not recreate the second case here, but saw the problems that might occur. So please download and test the new release and don’t hesitate to report any further bugs.
» Wordpress Plugin: Comvatars by Blogging Pro:
[…] Here is a plugin that combines the use of Gravatars and Favatars. However, it is preferrable to have both the Gravatar plugin and Favatar plugin installed in order to get the most functionality out of this plugin. He includes very extensive documentation on his plugin. […]
» Brian G:
looking forward to installing this plug-in. Thanks also for the great documentation. I too dislike when a great plug-in has poor documentation.
» Gravatar - Globally Recognized Avatar » Comvatars Plugin:
[…] Sören Weber has created a nifty WordPress plugin that combines the powers of the Gravatar and favatar plugins and has some other handy features. He even provides extensive documentation to get you up to speed. I haven’t tested this out, but it looks to have promise. […]
» Das walte Shelby » Meine 15 Minuten Ruhm:
[…] Im Zeitalter des Internets müsste es wohl eher 15 MB Ruhm heißen. Ganz egal, ich bin gebauchpinselt (ein Ausdruck, den ich bisher eigentlich nur von Markuskannte) denn mein Comvatars Plugin wird immer erfolgreicher, so dass ich es sogar schon ins offizielle Gravatars Blog geschafft habe. Z.Z. bastel ich gerade auf Wunsch an einer stark erweiterten Version, die dann auch eine Admin-Page enthält und mehrsprachig ist. […]
» Brian G:
does anyone know where i can get the favatise.php that will work with WordPress 1.5.2?
» Sören:
I saw that there is a problem with retrieving new favicons in combination with the Comvatars plugin, but haven’t researched the problem until now. I thought, it’s because auf a bug in my code but now it sounds more like a general problem with the Favatars plugin. I’ll take a look at it.
» Sören:
In software development it’s almost always: It’s done when it’s done. So I am proud to say: It’s done. Version 2.0 is ready for download. Greater, broader with more features than ever and some repaired bugs. Hope to hear from you…
» Psykotik:
It’s a great piece of code. Thank you very much, Söeren. Danke viel mals
Too bad, I’ve played a little bit with it, but since I have to go back to php 5, I will no more able to use it
Release 2 has got a lot of improvements, great work.
» Sören:
Hm, that was not my intention. The plugin should work either with PHP 4 or 5. What’s the problem with running it with PHP 5?
» J4P4N:
Du solltest die .zip-Dateien noch einmal überarbeiten - da sind einige unnötige Ordner drin, die weniger begabte Webmaster nur dazu verleiten könnten, dir merkwürdige Fragen zu stellen
» Sören:
Ich bin verzweifelt. Ich habe mir jetzt das aktuelle Comvatars Archiv, das Image Pool Archiv und das Archiv für die deutsche Übersetzung angesehen, aber alles sieht bei mir so wie es sein soll aus. Welche Ordner in welchem Archiv meinst du denn? Manchmal habe ich auch das Gefühl, dass Winzip nicht unbedingt die Superwaffe ist um Archive zu erzeugen. Meld dich mal.
» Markus:
Aloha Sören,
first of all: nice work! No need to tag the comment-file, it runs out-of-the-box. Gerat!
While trying to finetune your plugin, I was wondering about the differnt sizes: the gravatar and the favatar were pretty small (16×16), and your comvatar (for useres without gravatars or favatars) was pretty huge… (80×80). I finally found the setting in your comvatar.php, which has excellent comments on what-is-what. Now, the favators are still 16×16 (size of favicons), the rest got “the big picture” (hr-hr-hr)…
BTW: Favatar-part still not working on your site, I send this post with my old gravatar-email. Comvatars (with Favatars and Gravatars enabled) works on my site.
» Sören:
The Favatar/favicon is small by their nature. They are just 16×16px. If you want to avoid different sizes of Comvatar/Favatar/Gravatar but want them all at the same size, just define this in your stylesheet. Be warned: A Favatar displayed with 80×80px may not look very fancy.
A word on source file editing: As of version 2.0 their should be no need to edit the source file anymore. If you are missing some tweaking feature, write an email to me or write a comment here.
The Gravatar should be displayed on your public pages in the size you’ve defined in the Gravatars Wordpress admin panel. A size of 16×16px should only be applied in the Wordpress admin panel when viewing the dashboard or the comment management interface. Using a bigger size will cause the layout to look strange. If the plugin hasn’t behaved this way this may be a bug. Could you be more specific on this topic?
The Favatar plugin has its weaknesses in finding out the Favatar of a user. Especially it won’t execute a second time on a already made comment automatically. So after fixing my last bug with the Comvatars/Favatars interoperability I had to manually do a “Favatise” of my blog. This is now done and your Favicon should show up as expected. Does it?
» J4P4N:
Beim Entpacken der zip’s hatte ich einen Verzeichnisbaum mit Einträgen wie “backup”, “post-levels”, “themes”, “image-headlines” und “gravatars”.
Unter “themes” waren sogar noch deine Themes-Ordner, alles jedoch ohne Inhalt.
» Sören:
Winzip 9.0 has broken the zip archives and left some unused stuff that I have previously deleted out of the archive. I uploaded the archives again. This time they are fine - hopefully. Please do me a favour and make some clicks on http://dreckstool.de/ for the Winzip utility. This will definitly help to make the world better…
» Psykotik:
Thanks for your answer. It seems a lot of people are interested in your plugin
On my side, Comvatar has exactly the same problem that some others wordpress plugins when I run php 5 : I cannot access options from the admin panel, getting a “cannot redeclare function()”. For Comvatar, it’s a
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class comvatarmanager in […]\wp-content\plugins\comvatars.php on line 61
I get. If I downgrade to php 4 (4.4 release for instance), everything works like a charm.
I’ve tried to extensively search what are the updates from php 4 to 5 that could have that broken theses scripts, with no luck. And I get same errors with favatar or gravatar.
Any idea ?
Another thing : on your site (I haven’t tried on mine) the “avatar manager” seems to be broken : I cannot change the avatar, keep “image68.jpg” every time. BTW, it would be nice to have the choice to unselect these avatar : I mean, if I choose one of your new avatar, and I change my mind, how can I come back to my favicon, or to my gravatar ?
» Sören:
Okay, the PHP 5 problem sounds like a general problem how Wordpress includes the plugin files. I have PHP 5 installed at home but only tested the plugin with PHP 4. I’ll release a new version after this is fixed.
For the Gravatars and Favatars plugin I could provide a patch, once I’ve found the problem, but the right way would be to bring Skippy and Jeff Minard in the boat.
A question to your Avatar Manager problem: You’ve recognized that you have to confirm the change of your avatar by following a link that is send to you by email? Once you have set an avatar you can switch back to system default (so unselecting any avatar) by pressing a button at the end of the “Select Avatar” box. This is also outlined in the text on the Avatar Manager page. The button only appears after you’ve selected an avatar.
» Psykotik:
Comvatar and PHP 5 :
Well, it would be marvellous if you found wherefrom it comes. I hope it wouldn’t be too hard or too time consuming.
I’m pretty sure it comes from php 5 : I’ve had even tried with a fresh wordpress install. Moreover, my “php.ini” are almost identicals between php 4 installation and php 5.
I’ve tried to involve Skippy about his Gravatar, but he wasn’t… errr…. interested in. Let’s see if you find the problem too.
avatar management :
Ich müsste erinnern ein bischen deutsch ! Ich habe viele jahren deutsch gelernt !
Without your explanations, I wouldn’t have any clue of what were about the emails I was receiving when clicking; I thought it was a confirmation
Thanks for time.
» Sören:
Ah stupid me. I thought you tested it with your english installation of some test system. Because of the mixed audience here, I should also send such important mails in both, german and english translations.
Anyway, time to refresh your German
I also made the experience that Skippy isn’t very responsive. This may because of all the different projects (including his non-computer life) he’s involved in. Let’s see what I can do. First I have to find the problem…
» J4P4N:
I left my vote for winzip (and some others)
There has to be a reason why I use ZipGenius, I just forgot what it was… :p
» Sören:
Hey Psykotik, I just checked my development system here and found that it already is using PHP 5! I thought, this bug would be an easy one. It may is, if I work around the symptoms but I want to understand the reason why this is happening on your site but not on mine. So lets do some system check. At home I am using:
Windows XP
Apache 2.0.54
PHP 4.3.11 or PHP 5.0.4 (switchable)
Wordpress 1.5.2
My ISP is using:
Some kind of SuSE Linux (I guess kernel 2.4.20)
Apache 1.3.27
PHP 4.3.1
Wordpress 1.5.2
On both system everything is working fine.
» Psykotik:
Hallo ! Well, it doesn’t sound very good for me, but it’s good for your plugin “php 5 certified”
I’m using:
Windows XP
KFWS 2.5
PHP 5.0.4 (with PHP 4.4 it works well)
Wordpress 1.5.2
I guess it’s *maybe* related to my unusual webserver; I have to try with apache, but it wouldn’t answer to why with php 4 it works… very strange, I’ve to check again.
Anyway, there is nothing more that you can do, so I’ll let you know about my investigations
» Sören:
Well, just for the interested: I have released the version 2.1, that is fixing some minor issues and introducing a new avatar pool for registered users making it idependently of the pool for identified users.
Upgrading from 2.0 to 2.1 is done by just uploading the new plugin files.
» J4P4N:
» Sören:
Ja, da war ich etwas voreilig. Beim Kommentar schreiben hat das Plugin noch einen Fehler rausgeworfen. Daraufhin musste ich schnell die Archive löschen, damit den verbuggten Kram keiner installiert. Sehr viel länger als 10 Minuten kann das aber eigentlich nicht gedauert haben
» Tim Nolte:
Where is wp-comvatars-manager.php? It’s not in the ZIP file? Getting error in admin panel. Thanks.
» Sören:
Sorry Tim, where do I have my brain? You were right, I forgot to put it into the archive. Now it’s fixed and the modified archive is uploaded. Again, sorry for the bad experience…
» ZeroZen: Info, tips y trucos para Mac OS X » Avatars, Gravatars, Favatars y Comvatars:
[…] Una variante es Comvatars que combina el servicio de Gravatar y de Favatars en un solo plugin. Incluso te permite crear tus propios sets de avatras para que tus usarios puedan elegir. […]
» MacBros:
Interesting
» Mike:
Monkey?
» Mike:
Oh cool. how does it do that?
» Mike:
Just downloaded your plugin! Works great! Thanks for sharing! I still have to figure out how to make the comvatars show up on the right side like yours do,instead of in front of the commenters name! Thanks again.
Mike
» Sören:
To achieve that kind of layout, you have to turn off the default implementation in the Comvatars Admin Panel and have to manually add one of the Comvatars template tags to your comment template. E.g. a inside of the comment loop should do the job.
» Tim Nolte:
I’m getting the following error when I try to do a lookup for the Gravatar:
“You must specify a valid key. Don’t link directly to this site.”
Any ideas? I have noticed too the the gravatar website is currently under maintenance. But I’ve noticed too that on here my gravatar isn’t showing.
» Psykotik:
It reminds to me an error I had : I wrote down a wrong data in options -> comvatar “URL to registration manager:” (i forgot to change it to my new url).
» Psykotik:
Sören, would it be possible to change some behaviour of your plugin ?
Since I can fully use your plugin, I miss an option allowing to choose between the favicon and gravatar. I mean, your plugin gives the prevalence to favicon : if a favicon is found, it wouldn’t check the gravatar. I would like to choose how manage that. I prefer gravatar prior to favicon, but if there is no gravatar, I agree to show the favicon
An other thing related to the precedent : why can’t I change what I want to display in (your) blog’s comment ? I mean, I can’t choose my gravatar to display on your blog; I would happier to show my gravatar instead my favicon. Would it be possible to allow user to choose, as admin before ?
Thanks in advance for you help !
» Sören:
@Tim: Sorry, I just did a test comment to your blog to see what’s going on. First: My Gravatar is showing up, but in a very “bulky” way. That’s because you’ll request the Gravatars with 16 pixel in size. You can adjust this to the same value as used in your CSS (currently 32 pixel) in the admin panel of the Gravatars plugin.
Second: I am not quite sure, what you try to do. The error messages sound like one of the Comvatars Manager page, but your text states you’re trying to lookup the Gravatar?! To mess up the terms Comvatar, Favatar and Gravatar
. They are all avatar images but their origin is totally different. Anyway my Gravatar(!) shows up on your and my page, so I guess this was a temporarily disconnet of the Gravatars server at http://gravatar.com. Sorrowly this sometimes happens…
» Sören:
@Psykotik: Is your first post a bug report? Just sounds to me, the Comvatars plugin did a great job in reminding you that your Manager URL is incorrect or not set at all.
I should clearify the answer to How does your plugin apply avatars to comments? Assuming all related plugins are active, the more specific avatar has precedence over the more generic. So the sequence should always be:
Registered Comvatar
Gravatar
Favatar
Default Comvatar
If this is not the case, maybe the Gravatar server is down?! (See my previous comment).
Anyway, what was your solution for your problem of September 22th? I am just curious, cause I want to provide a bug free plugin (will this ever be possible?).
» Psykotik:
Well, it was a hint to Tim. Comvatar did a great job, indeed
Gravatar server is running, but I can’t my gravatar on your blog ! Only my favicon… So why ?
I made some trials, and finaly found that problem occurs with my gravatar : if I remove the “rating” section from the url, it works well. Very strange, but it has nothing to do with Comvatar, as I just discovered
I swear if I found the problem, you’d have been the first to be informed…
I moved to a professionnal host (since then, I was hosting myself) which use php 4.3.10. And I have no more any problem with your plugin.
Frankly speaking, I suspect it has to be related to my own php installation, which gave me some troubles, as a few wordpress’ plugins didn’t work (and not only yours).
» Sören:
Ha ha, got it. I had the option for “Default gravatar rating” set to “G” in the Gravatar admin panel. That was the reason, your Gravatar wasn’t showing up. I am not sure what your Gravatar was rated for, but obviously it wasn’t “G”
I now set it to “X” being curious what images will show up. Thanks for the “rating” hint.
Just one last question: What program do you use to generate your Favicon? I’am looking for years for a program that supports sizes above 16×16 but never was very successful.
» Psykotik:
I’m very curious to know why the hell my gravatar is rated for. Anyway, I cannot change anything right now, gravatar.com do not let to login in anymore.
Two programs :
1/ Photoshop, which needs the plugin for ico (free)
2/ IconXP, from aha-soft does the job too : http://www.aha-soft.com
I’m not sure Photoshop’s plugin let’s you include many different sizes in the .ico as IconXP does; maybe using layers, I can’t remember. That’s a lot of time I haven’t played with it
» Sören:
Maybe there is one pixel of private parts showing up thru all that shade of gray in that part of the image?
Is this you on the toilet?
I’ll check out the free software first. I am using Paintshop Pro at home and am not sure, whether the plugin also installs with this. Thanks a lot.
» Psykotik:
:)

Luckily not
It’s Edward Norton in Fight Club, looking at an ikea catalog as he was “reading” a pornographic revue.
» Tim Nolte:
Well part of my issue probably is that there is some kind of error finding the Manager file. I have it installed at the WP root and I have the URL set in the Comvatars options. No matter what I enter in there I get an error.
» Tim Nolte:
Oops, check here:
http://tim.noltefamily.org/wp-comvatars-manager.php
And try to search your email address and you’ll see how it errors.
» Tim Nolte:
Ok, after doing a little more investigatin it would seem that the comvatars plugin doesn’t work well with mod_rewrite URLs. When the wp-comvatars-manager.php generates the urls it generates them as http://noltefamily.org/tim/… rather than http://tim.noltefamily.org/ I’m thinking this might be part of the problem…
» Sören:
Hi Tim, lets sort out your problems.
As a non-admin user I can not search for any other users email address. This is one way to protect other users data and asure privacy. Only the admin can type in email addresses and see what avatar is registrated. So if I am following your link above, I will just see the usual error message:
“You must specify an action. Don’t link directly to this site.”
This is fine, and works as designed.
I did register my avatar at your site, and don’t have experienced any problems. As you mentioned above, it is right, that the most links are generated as
http://noltefamily.org/tim/wp-comvatars-manager.php
and not
http://tim.noltefamily.org/wp-comvatars-manager.php
For generating the addresses, the plugin uses a Wordpress property you can set in your Wordpress option panel. I am not sure what the exact wording in english Wordpress versions is, but it’s similar to “Wordpress address (URL)”. This is the third parameter on the first option page. The address you used there, should be the one you’ll see as links to various subpages of your blog.
So because I haven’t experienced an error in YOUR blog using the Comvatars plugin, please give a detailed error description.
» Tim Nolte:
I do have the WordPress URL set to http://tim.noltefamily.org but the comvatars plugin doesn’t seem to be using it in all cases. Ok, even as the admin I’m getting that error when searching for the email address too.
» Sören:
Hi Tim,
I’ve already sent you a new version 2.2 (beta) of the
Comvatars plugin. This should solve the problem with the mod-rewrite
rules. There was a part in the code where I haven’t taken the blog
settings for the URL but assambled it in some other way. This is now
fixed.
Anyway, I doubt that this patch will solve your problem. Because I
couldn’t recreate your reported behaviour here, I need some more
information. Could you send me your mod-rewrite rule, you’ve used in the
.htaccess file?
The text you’ve seen can only appear, when you try to find an registered
Comvatar and are logged in as a user with a user level to low for this
kind of access to the Comvatars registration. But in this case you
shouldn’t see the search form at all.
So you see me still puzzled…
» Jason Penney:
Just upgraded to the latest version from 1.4. I’m having some issues. The .comvatar CSS style doesn’t seem to be used anymore. I used to use that to get the image to float over on the right much like you do here, and now it’s just ignored.
Also I can’t figure out where the size is getting set. My gravatars plugin is set to 80, but I’m getting everything at 16.
Jay
» Sören:
Hi Jay,
I repeat my previous saying:
The Comvatars and Favatars will display in their native size. Meaning for Favatars it’s almost every time 16×16px, cause this is the most common size for favicons (there can by larger sizes too, but these are uncommon). The Comvatars delivered with the Comic Pool are a size of 80×80px.
If your avatars still shows up in a size 16×16px it either may be a Favatar or the stylesheet you’re using defines a “width” and “height” for the avatar image. If you still think it is a bug, could you provide a link to the malfunction output?
Because with the 2.x series of this plugin there are a few more different styles related to this plugin, I removed the “comvatar” class with the new “comvatar-default” class to be more specific. This topic was completly forgotten when I upgraded the plugins documentation. Sorry for this. After switching the style name in your template the style should work as before.I lost my brain somewhere between Hamburg and Hamburger - see my next post…» Jason Penney:
This does not appear to be the case. I looked at the code and it seemed that COMVATAR_DEFAULT_ICON_SIZE was being used no matter what I did (I emailed you a patch for the change I made to fix that).
That helped, but something else is going wrong. My old style was:
.comvatar {
border: 0;
vertical-align: top;
float: right;
padding-left: 2px;
}
This looked almost identical to what you have here (minus the border). With 2.x (after changing it to comvatar-default) it’s not showing up quite right (as you can see here).
Jay
» Sören:
Aaaahm, previous was false. Damn, bad brain *shake*. I’ll edit the previous comment, but repeat it here:
The class of the image still should be “comvatar”. What may cause breaking your layout is, that not only the img tag has the class “comvatar” applied but also the a tag where the image is embedded. So you may change your style from “.comvatar” to “img.comvatar”.
Sorry for causing confusion. The “comvatar-default” class is _only_ applied in the dashboard and the comment management interface. So a change of the COMVATAR_DEFAULT_ICON_SIZE define in the source code should _never_ be needed (except you are visually impaired like me
)
» Jason Penney:
That is not correct. When I do a view source on my page, the class is comvatar-default.
I changed my CSS to:
.comvatar-default img {
...
}
Now it looks right.
If I have COMVATAR_DEFAULT_ICON_SIZE set, that value is always passed in the gravatar url, because it seems to be always passed as $icon_size.
I’d be glad to have an out of the box comvitars.php, but I can’t get the size correct.
I’m not using template tags at all if that makes a difference.
Jay
» Sören:
Ahhhh, okay that’s the hint
Using the build in default implementation assumes that you don’t have to change _anything_. So if you use it, you are especially not allowed to change:
a) the source code
b) the CSS class “comvatar-default”
“comvatar-default” is used also in the WP admin panel. So if you change the size of the image inside the source code you should better take a quick look into your WP dashboard to see the mess it creates.
If you want to adjust:
a) size
b) positioning
c) anything else related to the avatar
you are advised to use one of the template tags or the (X)HTML tag <–comvatar –>. Quickest may be to place the (X)HTML tag at the position in the code where you want the avatar to show up _AND_ turn off default implementation in the Comvatars admin panel.
» Jason Penney:
I’ll just keep using my changed version then. It now does everything I want (mostly) without changing my theme.
Thanks for your help.
Jay
» Sören:
The problem I had when programming this was to determine if the site that is currently displayed is one of the WP admin panel or just a post because I wanted to have different sizes (and so CSS styles) applied to the images in both cases.
I guess now I reached the required level of smartness (if not overcome) to fix this with the next version. Anyway 2.2 is on its way, so I am sure the fix will already included in that version.
» surtin:
Hi I was just wondering if 2.2 is on the way anytime soon. I’ve been having the same issue as Jason Penney with the .css not working. I’ve even tried it with the template tags, it worked, but didn’t have the effect I wanted.
Basically what happened was that, gravatars (don’t know about favatars) would show up properly, but the comvatars that were in your package would just show up in random places.
I had my .css as something like:
.comvatar-default {
}
Without the template tags, every *vatar that wasn’t in your package would show up as 16×16, and it wasn’t pretty.
Thanks for your help and for making this great mod.
» Sören:
Sorrowly Tim Nolte hasn’t replied yet to my 2.2 beta. I thought I could hold back the next release until his bug was entirly fixed. But I see that there still are problems with the default implementation, so I’ll bundle up the version 2.2 today or tomorrow, that will fix at least surtins/Jasons problems.
» Tim Nolte:
Apologizes, I’ve been really busy with things. The URL issue was resolved in the 2.2 beta, thx! Here’s what’s happening still though with gravatar lookups. When I’m logged in as admin, and I go to the wp-comvatars-manager.php, to try and use the email search, I was getting the errors. I just checked it now and it appears that it’s sorted now with 2.2 beta. Here’s a question, how does one remove the local comvatar so as to revert back to the gravatar? Thx, I think 2.2 might be good to go for me. I have also experienced the CSS size issue. I did have my Gravatar size set but the Comvatar hard-coded size was taking over. I just changed the hard-coded Comvatars size for the time being.
» Sören:
Thanks for the response Tim. This helps a lot and I am happy that the patch solved your problem.
Okay, you all definately convinced me to change the default implementation in the next official version 2.2. I’ll hurry.
@Tim: Only _IF_ a user has selected a Comvatar, there will be a button in the lower right corner of the Avatar selection box, naming “Reset to site default”. See the screenshot above in the plugin description. Pressing this will cause the plugin to do the selection of the avatar as the user never has set his own avatar previously.
» Das walte Shelby » Pavatare - Avatare wohin man schaut:
[…] Auch ich bin selbstverständlich ganz und gar hip, trendy und machmal auch geil, so dass ich mit meinen Comvatars vielleicht ein klein wenig zum Chaos mit beigetragen habe. […]
» The Planting Life » Blog Archive » Plugins:
[…] Comvatars - This plugin utilizes the two plugins below and its own shell within wordpress to generate avatars for commentors […]
» Mike:
First off, Thanks for sharing this plugin..its works great. I’m still having trouble getting the comvatar to align “right” in the comments area. Default implemation is off, my template tag is
and its in my comment.php
Is there an exact place that tag needs to go?
Do I need to change my template css?
Heres the link to look how they are showing up. Link To Comments with Comvatar
Any Ideas on what I may be doing wrong? Thanks
Mike
» Sören:
Hi Mike, this has something to do with your CSS stylesheet. Try to put the comvatar tag in front of the
tag in your template (just two lines up) and add something like
a.comvatar {
float: right;
}
*.commentlist li {
height: 100%;
min-height: 100px;
}
to your style.css file. Be sure you edit the style.css file of the theme you are displaying your blog with! You may also want to experiment with maring and padding inside your CSS. Typically styling the avatar is out of the scope of this plugin because everyone want to appear it a bit different.
» Raf:
Hi folks - thanks for a great plugin, I just keep getting an error.
In the options page it states “URL to registration manager is not accessible.” even though the url in the field below is correct (ive tried moving this php file elsewhere but it still spits out this error) - and I presume because of this when I view my site’s comments ABOVE each avatar displayed is this error message:
“Warning: htmlentities(): charset `F j, Y’ not supported, assuming iso-8859-1 in /home/fmcentre/public_html/wp/wp-content/plugins/comvatars.php on line 1270″
Can anyone help me out with this problem?
I’m using WP v1.52
» surtin:
Okay I don’t know how, but I somehow got it semi-working. Using the template tags instead of the default implementation “sort of” works. Gravatrs and I’m assuming favatars are being placed correctly. But the default icon for people without gravatars or favatars still are placed like template tag’s were off.
If I change the CSS class from a.comvatar to .comvatar-default people with gravatar/favatars have a double border around them (seeing as how I use a border around the images, much like yours). I’ve tried adding both CSS classses to my stylesheet and unless I want a double border around gravatars default icons are placed in the default position.
Any idea as to why this is happening?
» Bron:
Yep..That was it! I tried that so many times will noavail..Works great this time! Thank again!
» Sören:
Sorry for the delay of version 2.2. I was on vacation last week and life was a little stressful before. Release will be coming soon…
» Sören:
Hey Raf, I checked the source code of the site you’ve had provided in your comment. Seems that you have set a false value in the WP admin panel under “Options/Reading/Encoding for pages and feed”. “F j, Y” is not an allowed value. Try “utf-8″ or “iso-8859-1″.
For the registration manager problem I’ll try to provide a fix in the next release.
» Sören:
Announcement: Version 2.3. released
This latestest release should solve the issues with unexpected behaviour when using the default implementation plus some other minor things. See changelog above…
» jillij:
I have made french localisation of comvatar for my own website. I though it could be of interest for the Community. The files are here: http://jillij.free.fr/wordpress/?p=55
Please let me know if you find any mistakes!
» jillij:
I did as you asked. Every é è ô à is now in html. Just download again the file.
» Blog » Archive du blog » Design du site:
[…] Ce site utilise l’intégration de PhpWebGallery et de Wordpress, appelée Photon et le plugin Comavatar […]
» John V:
Hoorah!
nice plugin, and I even got it inserted into my threaded comments (brian’s threaded) by inserting the template tag into comments.php in the div with the class “content”
Thanks!
» John V:
I’m curious as to why my favatar showed up on your site instead of my gravatar… but it’s not my site, so I guess I’ll just have to do some testing!
» John V:
is there a way to test just the gravatar portion?
» John V:
i got gravatars to show up using the comvatar plugin, but I had to delete the lines that checked to see if the gravatar plugin was installed in order to do it. I know it’s installed on mine, cause it works, but I had to comment out lines 1275, 1276 and 1286 of comvatars.php in order to get it to go through the gravatar fetch process…
I dunno why it didn’t think the gravatar plugin was installed, but my hack works for now, lemme know if this is going to cause a meltdown on my site.
and THEN… I found out that the gravatar system is case sensitive, so I removed the strtolower on line 1270 so that my own gravatar would show up, since I used capital letters when I signed up.
» J4P4N:
Mal wieder ein Hallo von mir
Ich habe eine gute Nachricht für Dich: Comvatars 2.3 funktioniert auch unter Wordpress 2.0 Beta 2
I have good news for you: Comvatars 2.3 also works with Wordpress 2.0 Beta 2
Falls Du den Link zum WP 2.0-Blog haben möchtest, schreib mir einfach
» Sören:
@John V: Thanks for giving the plugin a try. I’m wasn’t assure that Email address for the gravatar service are case sensitive. A little odd for my taste. I’ll talk to Tom Werner if this was by intent.
I am not sure why the Gravatar plugin detection failed on your blog. Do you named the plugin file somehow different from “gravatars.php”?
@J4P4N: Hey, that’s great news. I am really lazy on testing new software, so I am happy that some other volunteer already did this for me
» John V:
it was while I was testing skippy’s wp_gravatar in my templates that I noticed the case sensitive issue… maybe it’s an issue with his code? I tested his [email protected] address with some caps thrown in, and it doesn’t work when using wp_gravatar()… only if it’s all lower case. Mine only works with the capitol letters I specified when signing up.
And as for the gravatar plugin. It works. And it shows up in the “plugins used plugin” page. It’s definitely called gravatars.php. I just stopped debugging when I got it working… I quickly glanced at the differences between the check for the favatar and gravatar plugins, but didn’t really dig into it. I could keep going, but I’m happy that it works. If I do more debugging and find anything, I’ll let you know.
» Douglas A. Maske:
I guess I simply just don’t get it, I’ve installed the plugin and when I select a new one I get a invalid email address or invalid key error, what am I doing wrong?
» Sören:
@John V: I got a reply from Tom:
Hi Soren,
Yeah, I neglected to do lowercasing when I first wrote gravatar and so now
I’m stuck with the problem. I’m working on gravatar 2.0 which will utilize a
different requrest URL structure and solve the case sensitivity. Until then,
users will need to type their address the same as they registered.
Tom
So it seems, I have a bug to fix…
@Doug: I am not quite sure what you try to do. Do you have a screenshot you can mail or even better: can provide an URI?
» Effix:
I cant seem to get the plug-in working…. when i try to change my avatar, i get a confirmation email, but when i click the link i get an error, Invalid Key…. i cant locate the reason for the error? any suggestions.. ??
» Sören:
Hi Effix, can I make some test comments in your blog and try to register an avatar by myself to see the error? Therefore you may want to reduce the limit until registration is allowed to 1, so I don’t need to spam your blog
Sorrowly I can not reproduce the problem here at my host nor at home in my test environment. Everything there seems to work fine.
» Sören:
There’s a new version 2.4 with the following features:
* Bugfix: Request of Gravatars now casesensitve as implemented by Tom Werner. Thanks to Tom and John V
* Bugfix: Changing Avatars from the WP Admin panel now works. A big thanks to Morten
* Note to translators: The old .po files will still work
» Stuart Anderson:
This is a grate plugin! ive just got one question and one feature request.
The Flash file included with the zip is grate, i love being able to play with it, but the email button doesnt do anything? is is me or is not a way to get the face you’ve with out taking a screen shot of the page?
The other thing i wanted to ask was, as an administrator it would be really good to be able to set the avatars for someones email with out them having to confirm an email when most of them dont even have login accounts or access to see the Comvatars admin page. Is there any way to do this?
Stuart, Still a grate plugin thought!!
» Sören:
Hey Stuart, good to hear, that you like the plugin.
The flash wasn’t from me, I just included it into the plugin to give others a chance to create simmilar avatars (see wp-content/comvatars/reademe.txt). The email button was already broken when I got the plugin. To create Avatars I just made screenshots of the avatars and cut them out in my favorite grafic app. Sorrowly I haven’t got the flash sourcecode to fix the email functionality
Hm, the email confirmation is because I want to avoid that a user gets an avatar he don’t like. Regardless who has assigned it to him. This also includes protecting the user of administrators went nuts
So I currently have no ambition to change this behaviour unless more users recommend this feature.
» Joey Esquivel:
Excellent plugin! Thanks for the hard work on this!
» Psykotik:
Just updated from release 2.1 : it works like a charm ! Thank you Soeren !
BTW, I use a (french) translation. I managed to create a folder inside the plugin’s folder (so-called “/plugins/comvatar”), and everything works except the translation files : I have to put them into “/plugins/”, they do not work if I put it into “/plugins/comvatar”. It would be nice, if you can do an little update. But it is really a cosmetic change, your plugin is fantastisch !
Happy new year !
» Sören:
Thanks for the kind words
When I created this plugin I planned to put all related files into wp-content/plugins/comvatars but that wasn’t possible with WP < 2.0. Now it seems that this changed and I am thinking about to migrate this with one of the next plugin updates. Anyway all other plugins I know also put their .mo files into wp-content/plugins. So I just copied their behaviour.
» italo:
hey its very cool tnks!!
» Brian Bonner:
Is there some way to get the image to float left with the default installation? You know so the text wraps itself around the comvatar. I tried to use the .comvatar-default and use the same code I use in posts but it didn’t work for me.
» Brian Bonner:
I figured it out, here is the code if you want it.
.comvatar-default {
clear: both;
float: left;
position: relative;
padding: 2px;
display: inline;
}
» Brian Bonner:
Great Program! MY readers love it.
How does it apply avatars to identified users locally? Is it random?
» Sören:
Hi Brian, great to hear that you like the plugin.
Assignment of the avatars to identified users isn’t random but selects the same avatar if the comment author provides the same name AND email address. Neither anonymous or identified users “own” their assigned avatars. Because of this, it may happen that two user have the same avatar although they have provided different names and email addresses. You can reduce multi assignments of avatars by adding more avatar images to the appropriate pool.
» Brian Bonner:
OK, but since there were numerous avatars in that folder how does it decide which one to pick? I ASSuME it is random? Also for trackbacks with favatars turned on will it choose the favatar over the anonymous avatars? I think I read that right.
I actually took the reverse course of action, I limited the anonymous to one image and the identified to 3 images.
One feature request, allow users registered with the blog be able to choose a registered avatar?
» Sören:
Okay you asked for it, so here are the gory details:
1. The plugin calculates an integer hash value over name and email address of the comment author. 2. The range of integer values will be split into n equal sized ranges, where n is the number of avatars in the pool and each avatar gets one integer range assigned to.
3. The comment author gets the avatar from the pool, where the hash value fits into the range of the avatar from the pool.
You’re right, Trackbacks (and also Pingbacks) are not treated separatly. The same logical rules as for usual comments apply here, try to select a Gravatar, if this fails select a Favatar if this fails select an Avatar from one of the pools.
Your feature request is something I also thought about. Very probably this will be into the next revision of this plugin. This release may also support the new roles/capabilities model of WP 2.x and so will not be compatible with WP 1.x anymore. But these all are subject to change.
» Brian Bonner:
Thanks! I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions.
I already upgraded to 2.0, and I like the idea of using the WP roles. I look forward to your next release.
» Null:
Hi,
When can we expect the update? I installed this in wp 2.0 but got errors. So I think its better to wait for you update.
Sec (request perhaps) guest can choose from several avatars too (from a folder quests or something) I for one let no 1 register so only guests can post and they would like to choose a avatar too.
Null
» Null:
of and ps: the ability to not have to use the confirmation e-mail.
Great plugin!!
» Sören:
Hey Null, I can not help you with the errors you’ve experienced until you exactly describe the issue. The plugin works just great in my WP 2.0 environment, so this seems to be an issue related exclusivly to your installation.
The update will be released when it’s done. I’ll make a comment, so everyone who subscribed to this post will be informed.
The confirmation email has its reasons because of the way the plugin is currently working. It’s not implemented to bother the user but to protect his freedom of choice. This may change once a registered user (in the terms of WP) are allowed to use avatars.
» Null:
Hmm the error has disappeared? Strange it works now!
Well I like the idea of registrated users to choose an avatar like mentioned by Brian Bonner. (and for guests too
)
Can’t wait for the new release!
» Brian Bonner:
I am having a bit of a problem with IE not respecting a minimum height. extra padding is my only solution and it looks a bit bad. How do you stop a one line comment from making the pictures run out of the div?
» Brian Bonner:
Like this
» Sören:
Hi Brian, this comment functionality is lousy if you try to insert code. Esspecially HTML or CSS. If you want to share it, you can send it to my by the contact form by clicking “Sören” from the menu on the left side. I’ll then append it to your comment.
Anyway, you’re using the wrong browser
Just kidding. I am not much into browser wars.
» Brian Bonner:
No, I just wanted to know how you keep the picture from going outside the comment box if only one line is used in IE. I use Firefox btw, but everyone else uses IE. the min-height css sorks in FF but IE ignores it.
» Sören:
Brian, this isn’t rocket sience
If you are using FF at home, I recommend the “Web Developer” extension. With it you can examine CSS of any given page and even edit the CSS on the fly to test your changes. Just download it and play around a bit.
I simply achieved this effect by using the “float” attribute (as far as I remember). But CSS is out of the scope of this plugin discussion.
» Brian Bonner:
Could you email me your section of CSS? i had to add a bunch of bottom padding to stop the images from floating outside the text area into the next comment. This is kind of important to get the plugin to work properly. Maybe you can include the relevant CSS in the plugin for others?
In the meantime I will take your advice.
thanks!
» cre8d design blog:
[…] Provide visual cues - by adding a mini icon (what’s know as a Gravatar or Favatar or Comvatar, depending on how the icon is obtained) which is always the same for a commentor, one is able to scan comments more quickly. You can see whether only a few people are leaving a tonne of comments back and forth (especially ones which argue regularly) or whether the post is attracting a wide variety of commenters. See the Gravatar, Favatar and Comvatar plugins for Wordpress. […]
» Brak:
Love the plugin, but I’m wondering… Is there a way to turn off the email confirmation?
» Sören:
I quote myself from above:
» Brak:
I saw that above. Obviously that doesn’t really help me though. I’ve been having outgoing mail problems, so unless I can turn off this feature the plugin is useless to me. I can see why it might be helpful to some, but for my closed site it’s not necessary, and as I said, it actually prevents me from using the plugin.
I’ve poked around, trying to figure out what to comment out to remove this feature, but I haven’t found it. So again, is there a way to remove this requirement? If so, how?
» J.J:
Thanks for the info!
» Null:
I am also for at least an option to disable the e-mail comfirmation (= more freedom for users
) in the new version.
Null
ps. any news about this new version?
» Sören:
Sorry, currently I am very busy at work and in parallel developing a new theme for this blog. This costs almost all of my time, so I assume the next version somewhere at the end of March.
» diavolul e tot acolo » ModificÄ�ri în funcţionalitate:
[…] Comvatars reuneşte Gravatars şi Favatars şi în plus, chiar dacÄ� nu ai un avatar dintre astea douÄ�, îţi alege el din galeria proprie. La mai mult de 10 comentarii iţi poţi alege singur avatar. Oricum Ä�sta mi-a luat cel mai mult timp sÄ�-l pun la punct… datoritÄ� faptului cÄ� WP Gravatar Plug-in (sau Gravatar) nu e acelaşi lucru cu Gravatars. Eu am învÄ�ţat asta “the hard way”. Am luat Comvatars şi l-am modificat pentru Gravatar, apoi am dedus cÄ� nu era aşa degeaba , deci am cÄ�utat Gravatars şi a mers din prima… douÄ� ore . […]
» Null:
I am a little confused:
You have this: Als häufiger Kommentarschreiber kannst du deinen eigenen Avatar wählen.
I believe I can add this also with this:
?php function show_registration_manager_link(); ?
But where to put it? I want it at the same spot
Thx
» Niaomi:
Hey,
I am so new to PHP….. I’be tried installing comvatars on the lastest wordpress and screen is blank. When I try to access comvatars from manage there is nothing there. pLease can anybody help me out, Thanks
» here’s the deal:
[…] So then I stumbled upon the comvatar plugin, which uses a gravatar if you have one, a favicon if you don’t have a gravatar (but have a favicon), or finally a random image if you have neither. There even seems to be some functionality for letting you pick one just for your comments here (I haven’t tested that bit of it yet since: 1. I suspect it wont work, and 2. at some point there’s only so much time you can devote to bells and whistles.) It works well. Customizing the image positioning proved tricky, but I nailed that after a lot of twiddling around in CSS. […]
» Insanity Speaking » Awww…:
[…] How does THIS plugin sound to you? Sounds pretty good to me, better than gravatar and gives options. Pretty damn cool plugin. […]
» Otto:
I was having problems getting the Comvatars plugin to work properly with Skippy’s Gravatars plugin, but I found the solution. I don’t know why this was required, exactly, but adding:
include_once(”gravatars.php”);
to the beginning of the comvatars.php file made it actually work. It’s like the Comvatars plugin was not properly detecting that gravatars was installed and activated. Anyway, if anybody has any problems getting Gravatars to show up, try that.
» Stanton McCandlish:
Very impressive plugin. I have only two issues with it: 1: If it’s going to ship with both a *.php plug and readme file, it should be able to find itself in a subdirectory of …/plugins/comvatars/ (the geek fix is, of course, to edit the comvatars manager script to look for the plugin code in a subdir of plugins/, instead of in plugins/ itself, but it wouldn’t be at all hard to do an ‘if’, which when the comvatars.php file is not found in plugins/, it looks in plugins/comvatar/. Many of us like to keep our plugins directory as clean as possible.)
2: I have discovered a common condition in which Comvatars gives a bogus error message: “A user with the e-mail address ‘%s’ does not exist.” Well, 99% of the time when this error is generated, the user actually DOES exist. The error is most commonly generated when someone has posted comments enough times to earn access to comvatar, but not enough, if any, of their comments have been approved by the moderator. They ARE valid users, but the “$wpdb->get_results($query)” query doesn’t return results for them. There are two fixes for this. The complicated one is to do a multi-table query and figure out the precise thing to say. The simple one is to just change this: “sprintf(__(”A user with the e-mail address ‘%s’ does not exist.”, COMVATAR_PLUGIN_ID),” to: “sprintf(__(”A user with the e-mail address ‘%s’ does not exist, or (more likely) does not yet have enough approved comments. If this is a valid user, wait for your comments to be approved and then try again.”, COMVATAR_PLUGIN_ID),”. Other than these two little quibbles, I think this plug-in kicks butt!
PS: I do have a third quibble, actually. The message [paraphrase, not direct quote:] “This user hasn’t selected an avatar yet” text above the display of available avatars should not appear if the user has selected an avatar, and the message at the top says to go check your e-mail for the avatar change confirmation mail. The two messages directly conflict, and the result is confusing. I’m neither stupid nor drunk, but I literally SEVEN TIMES tried to set an avatar and simply didn’t notice the go-check-email message at top, all I noticed was the you’ve-not-selected-an-avatar message above the icons. If it confused me, I think it’s likely to confuse an average user 90+% of the time. Should show one message or the other, not both. Alternative to not showing second message at all: Change it to “Your avatar selection will not be valid until you respond to the confirmation e-mail. Please see message at top of page.”
PS: The “you are a frequent enough poster to get your own avatar” [paraphase, again] message could probably use an edit. If I set the min. post value to 0 or 1 that message makes no sense. Maybe just have it say something simpler, like “You may select your own avatar” or whatever. Only SOME installers of this are going to tie avatar availabily to number of posted comments. The “enough comments” message only makes sense if that value is >=3.
So OK, that’s 4 gripes, not two. Still, this does kick ass! Especially the tight, superseding integration with the two other avatar plugins. Masterful!
Actually make it 5 whines: For newbies, it would be nice if you would document the (Kubrick, at least) method for applying these avatars (with a look consistent with their application to comments) to posts as well as to comments. Experienced users can figure it out, but just having a switch or something in the config to make that happen would be cool, especially for multi-author blogs. It did not stretch my brain much, but I can imagine a whole lot of PHP-clueless people who would just despair and cry, at not being able to get that to work without having to learn a scripting language.
OK, fine, I’ll bitch about the documentation, too: You advise people to install the other two avatar plugins *as their installation instructions say to do so*. But that’s actually wrong. The Gravatars plugin wants you to to install a wp-content/ subdirectory with some stuff in it that Comvatars will just disable, and the other one (Favatars, I think it is called) has install instructions that tell you to modify your templates to include a line of code that your more detailed instructions say to remove. I think your basic install instructions should instead say to install ONLY the .php plugin files for these plugins and activate them, and to NOT follow the rest of their install instructions; and if you already have been using those plugins, then the user should see your more detailed install instructions for information on how to undo Favatar/Gravatar install specifics that will conflict with Comvatars.
SO, all that said, GREAT FREAKIN’ PLUGIN! It’s in my top 5 at this point, and I’ve been through a LOT of WP plugins!
Last note: The pixel dimension selection feature is totally brilliant (I mean who REALLY wants to see 80×80 user icons, huh?), as is the auto-display of the 16×16 versions on the Dashboard. Sweet.
I lied: One LAST thing… Feature request! Admin should be able to forcibly assign avatars to any user on the system with no confirm e-mail. It took me over an hour to set avatars for all of the writers (i.e., four) on the system I’m working on for a client. I had to individually logout/re-login as each, change their e-mail addresses to the admin one, post test comments to get access to comvatars manager, pick their photo, confirm their e-mail comvatar link, login as admin again, delete the bogus comment, and re-set their e-mail address, then repeat all of that for the next user. Not very efficient to say the least.
But anyway, it still is a *fanastic* plugin.
» Stanton McCandlish:
I’ve been trying for hours now to get Comvatars to do what it does for Comments also on Posts (e.g. on index.php). Not having much luck with this:
which I put after the date and user name just above posts. I do get avatars, but they are always 80×80, and they are always the randomly selected generic ones, not the custom ones for the users that have custom ones. I have not turned off the default behavior, and don’t want to. I’m perfectly happy with what Comvatars is doing with comments, I just want to apply to posts as well. Any hints?
» Stanton McCandlish:
There’s a Gravatars2 plugin now, that makes a log of cacheing improvements over the orginal. It uses some different directories, so I guess Comvatars would need an update to recognize it when it appears instead of Gravatars[1]. URL: http://zenpax.com/gravatars2/
» Confessions of an Expat’s Wife » Blog Archive » Comment Avatars:
[…] I recently installed a great plugin called Comvatars that combines avatars on my comment box. It also can work hand in hand with the existing favatars 2 by Jeff Minard and Co. and Gravatars 2.6 plugin by Skippy. […]
» Pace McCulloch:
Wow, great plugin. Thanks a ton! We love it.