A few days ago I was looking around the internet for a solution on how to add Gravatar avatars to my WordPress comments section, and I found out that its easier than I originally thought! I thought there might be quite a bit of code to implement but found out that it requires just one line of PHP. So here are the steps to adding user Gravatars to your comments.

Step One

The first thing to do i log into your blog and under ‘Settings’ click ‘Discussion’ scroll down to ‘Avatars’ and make sure that you have avatars turned on as shown below.

Once the you have chosen your setup as above you are ready to add the code into your comments template.

Step Two

Now under ‘Appearance’ select ‘Editor.’ In the right hand column you should see all the files that refer to your current theme. Select ‘Comments comments.php’ the template code for the comments section of your blog will now load in the main window where you can make changes and edit the code.

Dependent upon how your theme is structured you should be able to roughly work out where the comments are pulled in as in the image below. I have highlighted where i have added the line of code to pull in users avatars, each comment is placed in a list item. The Gravatar code is then added straight after the opening list item tag.

Add this single line of code.

<?php if(function_exists('get_avatar')) { echo get_avatar($comment, '40'); } ?>

And that’s it! Want to see a demo? then leave a comment below and you’ll see the avatars. You will need to style the position of the avatars, size etc which is controlled by the class .avatar