One thing I am really excited about is that Gravatars are really starting to gain popularity now that Automattic has purchased and is supporting them.  And now that support is built right into WordPress, it opens up a lot of options for WordPress users.

The most common place you’ll find a Gravatar is usually with an individual comment to help comments stand out.  Another place you will sometimes see them is in the sidebar, like we have it setup here at Hack WordPress.   One thing, however, that people are slowly coming around to is using Gravatars with blog posts to identify the author of the post.    This is something that is a great idea for a multi-author blog and something I’ve considered doing on this website.

So, how would you go about setting up Gravatars to display with each individual post?   Over at ThemeShaper, Ian Stewart recently shared an easy way to do this.   You just need the following code:

<?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_email(), '64' ); ?>

When used, WordPress will match up the e-mail address associated with the post author to determine what Gravatar to use.   The 64 is the size (pixels) of the Gravatar.

Great find Ian!

As we continue to gear up for WordPress 2.5, have you gotten your theme ready for Gravatars? In the past it required plugins, but now WordPress 2.5 has built-in Gravatar support. This means going forward, themes can easily be released with Gravatars built-in to the theme because no plugin will be required.

So, you’ve got WordPress 2.5 installed and you’re ready to assign Gravatars to your comments? All you need to do is a quick code hack to the comments loop where you want the Gravatar to show up:

<?php if(function_exists(’get_avatar’)){ echo get_avatar($comment, ‘50’);} ?>

I encourage everyone to support WordPress by displaying Gravatars on their blogs once you’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.5.

So far, today has started out great. In addition to the first round of the NCAA tournament starting off today, I just noticed that WordPress Hacks has reached its second milestone. Today is the first time we jumped the 1000 subscriber mark! Here is a quick screen shot I took to remember it by:

As for WordPress Hacks news, I am pleased to announce that we have added WordPress forums and a new theme to WordPress Hacks. I hope to have the forums stocked with information sometime this weekend. As for the theme change, this is only the first phase. I have a few more features to add, a comment section redesign to work on, and I am going to be adding more color to it in the coming weeks to try to make the theme a little brighter.

If the theme changes look a little familiar, that is because it was based upon Brian Gardner’s Revolution Pro theme. One thing many people don’t realize is that many of these premium WordPress themes are not designed specifically to be installed and activated (although most can be and will work well). They are designed to be used as templates for someone to create their own design. If you dig through Brian’s showcase, you can see tons of examples of people that have taken one of the Revolution designs and adjusted it to fit their needs.

Some things you’ll find now here at WordPress Hacks:

• A bigger emphasis on Gravatars - I’ve talked in the past about how I felt it was important to support Gravatars. In addition to finding them with the comments you leave, you’ll now also find them in the recent comments section of the sidebar.
• Recent trackbacks are now displayed - Whenever you send a trackback or pingback to WordPress Hacks, it will now be displayed in the sidebar with a link back to your website.
• Better emphasis on categories - In a recent review of WP Hacks, Ben Cook pointed out a couple things that he felt would improve our site. The first tip was that our archives need more emphasis. Our categories are now at the top and have drop-down’s for any children categories. His other tip will be addressed in phase two of the redesign.

The next phase will include more color and an improved comment section, among other things. In the meantime, if you run into any browser incompatibilities, please let us know. You can also let us know if there are any other improvements you would like to see.

Thanks again for supporting WordPress Hacks! The great readership support, comments, and community around this blog makes it so much fun to write for.

Do you have a Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar)? As a loyal fan of the WordPress software that runs each of my weblogs, I feel that it is important to support WordPress in any way that I can. Because this blog focuses on WordPress, that is especially true here.

You may remember that last October Automattic, the company behind WordPress, purchased Gravatar. In the time since then, they have revamped the infrastructure of Gravatar to drastically speed things up, integrated it into the WordPress.com platform, and then updated the Gravatar WordPress plugin to function better with self-hosted WordPress blogs.

If you don’t already have a Gravatar, I recommend you first sign up with Gravatar for a free account using whatever e-mail address you normally use to leave comments. Once confirmed, it will then prompt you to upload the avatar you want to use. You’ll need to use the e-mail address used for your Gravatar in the e-mail address field of the comment form (all in lower case) when leaving a comment for the Gravatar to display properly next to each comment.

Now that Automattic is backing it, and WordPress.com blogs have integrated them, I think that over time Gravatar will continue to grow and the service will continue to get better. It is with that belief that I decided to add individual Gravatars to the comments on this blog (I also revamped the comments section to better support it). I would also like to see other self-hosted WordPress blogs begin to support Gravatars as well (many currently either support MyBlogLog avatars, or no avatars at all), so what I decided to do is update this post with an outbound link to your blog if your blog supports Gravatars.

Here is what you need to do to get an inbound link to your homepage:

1. Update your blog to display the commentators Gravatar with their comment. This can easily be done by installing one of the many Gravatar plugins (including the official Gravatar WordPress plugin) and then calling the plugin somewhere in your comments.php file. Depending on the theme, it will usually go in the commentblock section. If your blog already supports Gravatars, skip to step 2!
2. Leave a comment below with a link to your blog.

It is really that easy! I will then confirm your blog displays Gravatars with the comments and update this post with a link to your blog’s homepage, giving you a quality inbound link and hopefully some additional traffic. I’d like to turn this post into a showcase of WordPress.org blogs that support Gravatar! [Continue Reading...]

One of my favorite things about premium WordPress themes is that they give theme authors the opportunity to truly show off their talents. Because the theme will be purchased rather than given free, they don’t hold anything back and truly create some incredible work.

Michael at Solostream is no exception. He has created a number of free themes in the past, but has since been concentrating on creating and selling a variety of premium WordPress themes for bloggers and businesses looking for a magazine-style theme.

His most recent premium theme WP-Magazine 1.0 is his best work to date (in my opinion). Here are some screen shots of a few pages:

Once purchased, you have access to five different home page layouts and four different category/archive page layouts. You can find more information about the layouts available here.

Other features include:

• Widget-Ready, User-Friendly, and Optimized for WordPress Versions 2.2 and Above
• Home Page Featured Article Glider Box
• Built-In Banner Ad Blocks
• Built-In Site Guide in Right Sidebar
• Customized Recent Comments in Sidebar With Gravatar Support
• Author Biography Information and Gravatar Included on Single Post Pages
• Alternating Color Comments With Gravatar Support
• XHTML Valid

In addition to these great features, this theme also supports several plugins “out of the box” including the following:

• Popularity Contest
• Most Commented
• WordPress 2.3 Related Posts

If you’d like to view this theme in action, check out the WP-Magazine Demo Site. You can also purchase the theme from that site.