peterwsterling

<p>Once the widget is added to your sidebar you may easily configure it to provide a display of recent comments with comment author avatars.  The options are:</p>
<ul>
<li>The title of the widget.</li>
<li>Limit the number of comments to shown (1 to 15).</li>
<li>Option to display the avatar of the comment author, or not.</li>
<li>Set the size of the avatar.</li>
<li>Chose to have the comment author’s URL (if given) open in a new window,</li>
<li>Show the date of the comment, or not.</li>
<li>Set the format of the date.</li>
<li>Set the size (as a fraction of the normal text size) of the date string.</li>
<li>Show an excerpt from the comment.</li>
<li>Convert smilies in the excerpt.</li>
<li>Show a country flag indicating the source of the comment, requires MySQL database modifications, see below.</li>
<li>Show a country flag in main comment loops, non-widget, requires theme and MySQL database modifications, see below.</li>
</ul>
<p>The style of the output may be controlled with simple CSS rules that need to be included in your <code>styles.css</code> template file.<br />
    The container (i.e. <code><ul></code> or <code><table></code>) has the id recentcomments (use CSS <code>.recentcomments</code>).<br />
    List items (i.e. <code><li></code>) have the class recentcomments (use CSS <code>#recentcomments</code>).</p>


Recent Comments with Avatars

This plug-in provides a configurable widget to display recent comments with comment author avatars.

<p>Wavatars is a plugin that will generate and assign icons to the visitors leaving comments at your site. The icons are based on email,<br />
so a given visitor will get the same icon each time they comment.  It livens up comment threads and gives people memorable “faces” to<br />
aid in following conversations.  It’s also fun.</p>
<p>Features:</p>
<ol>
<li>Wavatars can generate 956,384 different shapes in 57,600 different color combinations for a total of 55,087,718,400 (55 billion)<br />
unique Wavatars.  Yeah, you should have plenty.  You’ll run out of human beings (or hard drive space) long before you run out of<br />
Wavatars.</li>
<li>The icons are generated on-the-fly.  You can adjust the desired size of the icons.</li>
<li>For easy deployment, icons will automatically precede the commenter’s name.  You can set HTML to come directly before and after the<br />
icon (to put it inside of a <DIV> tag, for example) or you can control the placement of the icons manually if you don’t mind adding<br />
a single line of PHP to your theme.</li>
<li>Wavatars are based entirely on email and are thus very portable.  The same email will result in the same Wavatar, even on different<br />
sites, so users will have the same icon on all Wavatar-enabled sites.  (Assuming, or course, that there are other Wavatar-enabled<br />
sites.  I don’t know if anyone will want this plugin or not.)</li>
<li>This plugin also supports <a href="http://site.gravatar.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Gravatars</a>.  If you like, it can show the Gravatar for a given user<br />
(if available) and fall back on their Wavatar only if they don’t have a Gravatar set up.  This means users can choose to set up a unique<br />
icon for themselves, and if they don’t, they will be assigned a unique Wavatar.  This is a great system that lets people personalize if<br />
they want, yet still provide a decent icon for the lazy or apathetic.</li>
</ol>
<h3>Revision History</h3>
<h3>Version 1.1.3</h3>
<ul>
<li>Fixed bad encoding which would prevent wavatars from appearing if the rating was NOT blank. If the admin does not specify a rating, the rating field is omitted.</li>
<li>Fixed a typo on the admin panel.</li>
<li>The wavatar url is now URL encoded.</li>
<li>The image tag no longer uses the pointless “border tag, and it is now properly closed.</li>
<li>Removed extra (pointless, harmless) repeated calls to strtolower ().</li>
</ul>
<p>Thanks to Gavin Lambert for many of these changes.</p>
<h3>Version 1.1.2</h3>
<ul>
<li>Made several small changes to comply with the changes at gravatars.com.  Appended .jpg to the $md5 hash, switched to using the new (shorter) field names.</li>
<li>Fixed bug where the plugin was inserting wavatars in places it shouldn’t, such as RSS comment feeds and in sidebar wigits.  The auto-placement will now ONLY place<br />
icons when viewing a single post or a page.</li>
<li>When placing icons manually within their theme, users should use <code>wavatar_show($comment->comment_author_email)</code> as opposed to<br />
wavatar_show($comment_author_email), as the eariler versions directed.  The latter will work in some situations but fail in others, and so the former is more correct.<br />
The readme and the admin panel have been updated to reflect this.</li>
<li>The admin panel will now list how many wavatars are in the cache.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 1.1.0</h3>
<ul>
<li>Fixed bug where setting AVATAR_SIZE to an odd number would cause PHP to pass floating-point values to imagefill (), which is not a good idea.</li>
<li>Fixed bug where gravatars were always requested at 60×60, instead of the size defined in the admin panel.</li>
<li>Added the function wavatar_get (email, size), which will return the url of the requested avatar instead of displaying it.  This can be useful if you want to use the<br />
image in other ways, such as making it the background of an HTML element.  You could also use this if you need to display the image in a rectangular area instead of a square.</li>
<li>Added option for controlling the rating of gravatars. (G, PG, R, X)</li>
<li>Added options for how to handle users who leave the email field blank.  You can choose to give them a wavatar anyway, to give them a blank image, or show no image at all.</li>
<li>The link back to the wavatars homepage in the footer is now actually a link and not just text.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Version 1.0.1</h3>
<ul>
<li>Initial release.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Advanced Tricks</h3>
<h4>Using wavatar_show ()</h4>
<p>If you place Wavatars by calling wavatar_show () manually, note that you can also specify an optional “size” argument to override the<br />
default. For example:</p>
<pre><code>wavatar_show($comment->comment_author_email, '160');
</code></pre>
<p>This would cause the Wavatar to be 160×160 pixels, even if the default was set to some other value.  You could do this to make admin icons<br />
larger, for example.</p>
<h4>Using wavatar_get ()</h4>
<p>If wavatar_show () STILL doesn’t give you enough control, you can call:</p>
<pre><code>wavatar_get(email, size);
</code></pre>
<p>And it will return the URL to the created image without writing anything to the page.</p>
<h4>Random Wavatar Field</h4>
<p>Put this code in your theme:</p>
<pre><code>for ($i = 0; $i < 100; $i++)
    wavatar_show ($i);
</code></pre>
<p>It will generate a field of 100 random wavatars, which is amusing.  This is how I generated the wavatar screenshot.  It’s also a great way to quickly<br />
test you source images if you’re editing the composite parts to make new wavatar types.</p>


Wavatars

Wavatars will generate and assign icons to the visitors leaving comments at your site.  It can optionally show Gravatars as well.

Recent Comments with Avatars vs Wavatars