Gravatar Enhanced WordPress Plugin

Gravatar support is already built into WordPress, and your avatar image will show wherever you use the email associated with it.

We have created a separate plugin, Gravatar Enhanced, which you can install to access additional features and improve your Gravatar and WordPress experience.

This will add features such as:

• Hovercards so visitors can see who the avatars are
• Email notifications where commentors without a Gravatar will be prompted to create one, making for a richer site
• Enhanced privacy with the new local avatar proxy and the referrer disabling
• Quickly upload and select new images with Gravatar Quick Editor
• New Gravatar Profile block to easily display information about anyone
• Smaller improvements such as using SHA256 instead of MD5 and adding a proper alt tag to images

Installation

You can install the plugin by clicking the above button, or going to your WordPress plugins page and searching for ‘gravatar enhanced’. You can then install and activate the plugin there.

For a manual install you will need to:

• Download the plugin from https://wordpress.org/plugins/gravatar-enhanced/
• Copy to your plugin directory
• Unzip the plugin
• Activate the plugin from the WordPress plugins page

Usage

You can configure the plugin from the Settings > Discussion page. Here you will find additional options and can enable or disable various modules as needed.

Users can upload new avatars from their profile page.

Hovercards

Hovercards are enabled by default and will show enhanced information to all visitors.

Note that if you have Jetpack enabled then the hovercard setting there will be used in preference to this plugin.

If you want to disable Hovercards you can do so by using the following filter:

add_filter( 'gravatar_enhanced_hovercards_module_enabled', '__return_false' );

Email Notifications

Showing Gravatars on your site is a great way to increase usage, but it relies on your users creating these avatars and providing interesting and engaging profiles.

The email notification feature will send an email to any new commentor on your site who doesn’t already have a Gravatar. You can configure the email content. Only one email is sent per new user.

Proxy

Normally when WordPress needs to display an avatar it references the image on gravatar.com. This is part of the Automattic network, which is hosted around the globe on high performance servers.

You will generally experience the best performance by using the default. However, for some sites it may be preferable to not make a lot of external requests. For example, on an internal company site, or where you have privacy concerns. In these situations you can use the Gravatar proxy.

This can be enabled from the discussions page and after enabling you can decide what type of proxy you want.

• Proxy and mirror URLs – requested avatars are copied locally and stored with a filename that matches the same one used on Gravatar. The request to download the image is made by your server, not by the client requesting the page
• Proxy with unique URLs – as above, but images are stored with a filename that is unique to your site and has no connection to Gravatar

Note that all cached avatars are stored in the gravatar directory in your configured uploads directory. You should ensure your web server has permissions to create this directory and add files to it.

Cached images are cleared on a weekly schedule using the WordPress cron system. You can change the gravatar_proxy_flush_frequency filter described below. Note that if a user changes there avatar during this period it will not be reflected on your site until the cache has been cleared.

You can manually clear the cached by pressing the ‘flush cache’ button on the discussions page. Note that the discussions page itself shows several avatars, and these will immediately appear in the cache after it has been cleared.

ℹ️ Hovercards are currently disabled when the proxy is used.

The following WordPress filters are available for advanced configuration:

• gravatar_proxy_flush_frequency – a WP Cron interval that determines how often the cache is cleared
• gravatar_proxy_max_download_time – the maximum time spent by your server downloading avatars in a single request (seconds, defaults to 5 seconds)
• gravatar_proxy_max_downloads – the maximum number of images downloaded in a single request (defaults to 20)

Quick Editor

This updates the User > Profile page to make it easier to change your avatar.

You can click the ‘Edit profile’ button to open a popup window and directly update your avatar.

If your Gravatar description is different from your local user description you can also synchronise this.

Gravatar Profile Block

This is a brand new block that we have prepared for you.

Effortlessly pull enriched profile information directly from Gravatar and display it on your website. Whether it’s the author of a post, a specific user, or someone you know by their email address, you can instantly feature their details with this block.

Enhance your About Me page with stylish profiles, create an impressive employee directory, or give your content creators the spotlight they deserve. Get creative with it—there are countless ways to make profiles shine!

Tailor the profile card by easily removing elements that don’t fit your design. Display only the essential information, like avatar, name, job title, company, location, and verified accounts. You can also customize the overall style by adjusting text and background colors, margins, borders, and shadows for a polished look.