Quick Tip: Custom Default Gravatar in WordPress

WordPress gives us lots of little things we can tweak to our own needs. WordPress out of the box includes Gravatar support and has a number of ways you can use this in your themes and plugins.

The usual situation is attaching a Gravatar to when someone posts a comment (as happens on my site) if that person does not have a Gravatar account you can define in the Admin Dashboard what should be shown. You get a few choices which aren’t bad but you can create your own custom Gravatar to put a small but personal touch to your site.

Firstly create an image to use, it should be 70px x 70px and save it as a JPEG. You can stick it anywhere you like in your theme folder setup but I’m sticking it in /mytheme/images.

Next we need to tell WordPress about it. Open up your themes functions.php and stick in the following code, modifying it to fit your needs.

function custom_gravatar ( $avatar_defaults ) {
$mytavatar = get_theme_directory_uri . '/images/avatar.jpg'; //Make Sure you change this depending on your image name and location
$avatar_defaults[ $mytavatar ] = 'My Custom Gravatar'; //This is what is displayed in the Admin settings when Picking your Default Avatar
 return $avatar_defaults;
 }

add_filter( 'avatar_defaults', 'custom_gravatar'  );

That’s it. It’s only a few lines of code and you can really make a difference.

Filed under Developer. No comments, on purpose.