== 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 git://github.com/woods/gravatar-plugin.git
or, if you're using piston[http://piston.rubyforge.org] (worth it!):
cd ~/myapp/vendor/plugins
piston import git://github.com/woods/gravatar-plugin.git
== 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
Thanks to Magnus Bergmark (http://github.com/Mange), who contributed the SSL
support in this plugin, as well as a few minor fixes.
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
* Add specs for ssl support
* Finish rdoc documentation
560e915c50