Working With Rails

Gravatar

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: http://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 svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/gravatarplugin/plugins/gravatar

or, if you’re using piston[http://piston.rubyforge.org] (worth it!):

cd ~/myapp/vendor/plugins
 piston import svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/gravatarplugin/plugins/gravatar

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

• Seth Rasmussen created the gravatar gem[http://gravatar.rubyforge.org]
• Matt McCray has also created a gravatar plugin[http://mattmccray.com/svn/rails/plugins/gravatar_helper]

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

• Get full spec coverage
• Finish rdoc documentation

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly