Adding Gravatars to your site

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8 October 2010 | Aram Balakjian | Images, Member, Decorators | Supports v2.4, v2.3

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Gravatar is a great service that allows you to pull in members profile photos directly from their Gravatar accounts. It's used right here on SSbits and it also part of the Forum module. It's also incredibly easy to integrate into your site! 

Because we need to get the Gravatar for each member, we need to add this function to the Member Class via a decorator, so inside a new file mysite/code/MemberDecorator.php add the following:

<?php
class MemberDecorator extends DataObjectDecorator {
	
	function getMemberAvatarURL($Size = 100)
	{
		//Set the defalt avatar image
		$default = Director::absoluteBaseURL() . 'themes/MyTheme/images/DefaultAvatar.png';

		return "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/".md5($this->owner->Email)."?default=".urlencode($default)."&amp;size=" . $Size;		
	}
}

All we are doing here is first  setting the default image (which will be used if they don't have a Gravatar account), then contructing the link to fetch the image. Notice the use or $this->owner->Email, this is because we are in a decorator, so $this won't know to reference the Class we are decorating. We also pass in $Size so that we can easily define the size of the image we want. Currently Gravatar only supports square images. In order to register our decorator you need to add this to the mysite/_config.php file:

 

Object::add_extension('Member', 'MemberDecorator');

Then in your template, you can simply do:

 

<img src="$CurrentMember.MemberAvatarURL" alt="Avatar" />

Overriding with Local Avatar

Often you will want to give the user the option to override the Gravatar with a different image (like here on SSbits). To do that we just need to provide an if() statement that checks for a local image and if it finds one then return it, otherwise it returns the Gravatar. Your function would look something like this:

	function getMemberAvatarURL($Size = 100)
	{
		//Set the defalt avatar image
		$default = Director::absoluteBaseURL() . ContentController::SiteConfig()->DefaultAvatar()->CroppedImage($Size,$Size)->Link();
		
		// if they have uploaded an image
		if($this->owner->AvatarID && $avatar =  $this->owner->Avatar()) 
		{
			if($resizedAvatar = $avatar->CroppedImage($Size,$Size));
			{
				return $resizedAvatar->URL;
			}	
		}

		return "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/".md5($this->owner->Email)."?default=".urlencode($default)."&size=" . $Size;		
	}

Here we first check whether our Member has an avatar uploaded into the Avatar field and if they do we return a Cropped version of that, otherwise we go and fetch their Gravatar.

So there you go, it's as simple and effective as that!