Gravatar Plugin¶ ↑

This plugin provides a handful of view helpers for displaying gravatars (globally-recognized avatars).

Gravatars allow users to configure an avatar to go with their email address at a central location: gravatar.com. Gravatar-aware websites (such as yours) can then look up and display each user’s preferred avatar, without having to handle avatar management. The user gets the benefit of not having to set up an avatar for each site that they post on.

Installation¶ ↑

cd ~/myapp
ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/woods/gravatar-plugin.git

or, if you’re using piston (worth it!):

cd ~/myapp/vendor/plugins
piston import git://github.com/woods/gravatar-plugin.git

Example¶ ↑

If you represent your users with a model that has an email method (typical for most rails authentication setups), then you can simply use this method in your views:

<%= gravatar_for @user %>

This will be replaced with the full HTML img tag necessary for displaying that user’s gravatar.

Other helpers are documented under GravatarHelper::PublicMethods.

Acknowledgments¶ ↑

Thanks to Magnus Bergmark (github.com/Mange), who contributed the SSL support in this plugin, as well as a few minor fixes.

The following people have also written gravatar-related Ruby libraries:

• Seth Rasmussen created the gravatar gem

• Matt McCray has also created a gravatar plugin

Author¶ ↑

Scott A. Woods
West Arete Computing, Inc.
http://westarete.com
scott at westarete dot com

TODO¶ ↑

• Add specs for ssl support

• Finish rdoc documentation