WordPress Gravatars: What They Are and How to Install Them

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Gravatar avatars are small images that represent an email address. Their purpose is to allow for global recognition of commenters and persons on the Internet. Rather than having a different avatar for different sites, people can register an avatar at Gravatar.com and associate it with their own unique email address.

Blog posts in WordPress that have commenting enabled typically require an email address to submit a comment. Once a comment has been submitted with the email field filled in, WordPress sends the email address as a data string to Gravatar.com; if Gravatar.com has an avatar for that email address, the avatar will be used. Often times Gravatar.com does not have an avatar associated with an email address, in which case a default avatar is used.

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Tags: commenting, gravatar, wordpress help, wordpress tutorials
Posted in Blogging 101, WordPress Blogging | 2 Comments »