When someone places a comment in WordPress, the blog tries to identify them by email. The email address is not shown on the comments, but if they happen to have a Gravatar account, their profile picture from that service will be used.
If a Gravatar is not found for that email, then a default image will be used. WP can be set up to use
- “Static” default avatars, which are shared between all anonymous commenters, and
- “Generated” default avatars, which will vary from user to user.
This configuration resides in Settings > Discussion .
You can see the difference between “Generated” and “Static”.
I wanted something similar to the “Generated” ones, but more personalized.
In order to achieve this, one can modify the behaviour of the function get_avatar(). There is two main ways:
- You can add a filter to the avatar_defaults option, and modify the “avatars array” in order to get a new “Static” default avatar option in Discussion Settings. You can see an example here.
- You can add the filter to pre_option_avatar_default , and return any URL you want.
I will use the second option, so the URL returned will be picked up randomly from a set.
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// Random Chameleon Avatar add_filter( 'pre_option_avatar_default', 'chameleon_default_avatar' ); function chameleon_default_avatar ( $value ) { return admin_url( 'images' ) . '/cham_avatars/cham_avatar'.rand( 0 , 13 ).'.jpg'; } |
This will modify the regular flow WordPress uses, and return a custom random avatar. I created 14 avatars, named them cham_avatar0.jpg to cham_avatar13.jpg , and copied them into my wp_admin/images/cham_avatars folder .
The problem is that modifying the source code of WordPress directly is not ideal, because will be messed up in WP updates.
I recommend using the WordPress plugin Code Snippets for this. It helps keep your modifications organized and safe from updates, and you can easily enable or disable them.
So I followed these steps:
- installed Code Snippets
- downloaded a bunch of Creative Commons chamaeleons that I liked, and cropped them
- resized them with for i in *; do convert $i -resize 90x90 $i; done ,
- uploaded to my website’s
wp-admin/images/cham_avatars/ folder,
- pasted the code snippet, and
- hit save and enable.
It is really that simple!
That’s so helpful, thank you! I spent the whole evening figuring out how to write a plugin for that, silly me.
I love my new avatars – feel free to check out annagrunduls.com to see what I did. When you scroll down on the index page, you’ll see a product reviews tab – the comments all have illustrated avatars now, thanks to you! 🙂
wow yeah, that looks nice! 🙂
Unfortunately the folder got wiped on the last WordPress Update…
Is there a better folder structure that wont get overwritten?
funny, that did not happen to me
Looks great but Buddypress overrides these settings with bp_core_fetch_avatar. I tried replacing “pre_option_avatar_default” with “bp_core_fetch_avatar” in your above code but it doesn’t work .
What to do in this case then ?
Mmm I have not tried it with Buddypress, sorry
NCPi is really amazing, your doing a great job.
About wordpess en NCPi. I think it is possible, should be pissible to run a wordpress website on NCPi. But how do i get this to work, also with all the security benefits that NCPi has to offer. I want my website to have ssl to. And nextcloud to be on a subdomain (mystuff.yourwebsite.com/) so the website runs on the mainsomain.
I hoop you guys can help me out, thnx
Hi,
Please, use the forums for questions and discussions
hi
Is this currently possible?
Awesome and exactly what I was looking for.
The only minor issue I could see is that when the same user reply a second or third time in the same thread he still gets assigned a random avatar.
And also avatars change after every F5…
any possible solution?. Thanks.!