T w e n t y S i d e d

Overview:

Wavatars is a plugin that will generate and assign icons to the visitors leaving comments at your site. The icons are based on email, so a given visitor will get the same icon each time they comment. It livens up comment threads and gives people memorable “faces” to aid in following conversation threads. It’s also fun.

Features:

1. Wavatars can generate 956,384 different shapes in 57,600 different color combinations for a total of 55,087,718,400 (55 billion) unique Wavatars. Yeah, you should have plenty. You’ll run out of human beings (or hard drive space) long before you run out of Wavatars.
2. The icons are generated on-the-fly. You can adjust the desired size of the icons.
3. For easy deployment, icons will automatically preceed the commenter’s name. You can set HTML to come directly before and after the icon (to put it inside of a <DIV> tag, for example) or you can control the placement of the icons manually if you don’t mind adding a single line of PHP to your theme.
4. Wavatars are based entirely on email and are thus very portable. The same email will result in the same Wavatar, even on different sites, so users will have the same icon on all Wavatar-enabled sites. (Assuming, or course, that there are other Wavatar-enabled sites. I don’t know if anyone will want this plugin or not.)
5. This plugin also supports Gravatars. If you like, it can show the Gravatar for a given user (if available) and fall back on their Wavatar only if they don’t have a Gravatar set up. This means users can choose to set up a unique icon for themselves, and if they don’t, they will be assigned a unique Wavatar. This is a great system that lets people personalize if they want, yet still provide a decent icon for the lazy or apathetic.

Installation

1. Download the plugin.
2. Copy it onto your website in the wordpress /plugins folder. Then enable the plugin. That’s it. Wavatars will instantly appear for all posts (even old ones) on your blog. If you don’t like how the image looks within your theme, read on…

The administration panel is under Options » Wavatars. You can adjust the size of the Wavatars, and assign HTML to come before and after each image to help nudge it into place. Each image is also set with the CSS “wavatars” class. On this site, I don’t have any HTML prefix or suffix, and instead just added these lines to my CSS:


.wavatar {
float: left;
padding: 3px;
background: #fff;
margin-top: -25px;
margin-left: -25px;
margin-right: 5px;
}


If that still doesn’t give you enough control over wavatar placement and you don’t mind editing your theme, just turn off automatic placement and add the line wavatar_show($comment_author_email); to your comment loop wherever you want the image to appear.

Your mileagle may vary. It all depends on your installed theme.

Note that the plugin requires that your install of PHP support the GD library. If it doesn’t, the Wavatars won’t show up and you’ll get a warning in the Wavatar admin panel. You can still use this plugin to display Gravatars, even if the GD library isn’t available.

This is the first release. You could even go so far as to call it “beta” if you want to be formal about it. It’s only been tested on one server (this one) so far. Please leave bug reports and questions in the comments below.

Download Wavatars v1.0.0

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

After I showed off my new Wavatars WordPress plugin on Saturday, a lot of people posted just to see what their wavatar looked like. I feel bad, but I’m afraid that initial system had to go and as a result, everyone’s Wavatar has been changed. This was for a good cause. I’ve moved away from PHP generated random numbers to random values derived directly from the hash of the email. To translate out of programmer babble: The plugin will now generate the same wavatar for you no matter where the plugin is running. Different websites running the same plugin will give you the same, predictable results.

I also added a bunch of new parts for greater variety, so the plugin can now generate 956,384 different shapes in 57,600 different color combinations for a total of 55,087,718,400 unique Wavatars. That should be enough combinations for now.

I’ll be releasing the plugin later this week. If you have a WordPress blog then you’ll be able to have wavatars on your own site. I’ve ironed out the installation problems, so that you should be able to simply upload the thing and turn it on. (In theory.)

Also, I can’t take credit for the idea, which I first saw at implemented as MonsterID. (Hat Tip: MetaBLOG.)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I’m doing a large update to the site right now. If something breaks, that’s why.

8:45am Step 1: I’m deleting a bunch of old plugins, removing orphaned files, removing a bunch of themes I’m not using, and a bunch of other fussy stuff.

9:00am Step 2: Some changes to the theme. The monthly list of archives is replaced with a much-shorter yearly list. The category icons are a little nicer. Some other minor tweaks to spacing & placement. Gravatars are gone for the moment, but I’ll put them back later.

9:15am Step 3: Wow. I managed to get this far without breaking anything. Check out the sidebar on the right, and you should see the new theme switcher, wich will allow you to change between white and black layouts.

9:45am Step 4: What a pain. I made a plugin to generate little smiley face avatars (for people who dont have Gravatars) and it worked great locally, but failed in a dozen different ways once I made it live here on the server. Between different versions of PHP and file write permission problems, I had to make all sorts of goofy changes. Boo.

10:00am Step 5: Okay, the fallback icons (I’m calling them “wavatars”) are working again. So, if you have a Gravatar it should use it. If you DON’T, you should get a unique avatar generated by your email adress.

10:30am All Done: The “wavatars” was going to be a plugin for public release. I thought it was ready for distrubution, but the problems I encountered just installing it on my own server indicate that I need to add some version checking. I REALLY wanted it to be seamless and useable for non-technical users, but I see there is no way to avoid it: The user has to be at least savvy enough to set directory permissions to 777 for the thing to work. PHP can create the directory, but not set it to 777. Dang.

I still do plan on releasing wavatars, although I need to test it a bit better to make sure it can fail gracefully instead of puking PHP errors all over the comments when something goes wrong.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.