Introduction

This is the django application for nonintrusive avatar support. It uses site's URL and user's email for autodiscovery.

In opposite to django-avatar, this application does not allow users to upload their own pictures to the servers. Instead of this, django-faces tries to discover user's avatar using his site's URL or his email.

Right now, django-faces can use Pavatar protocol to show avatar for web site, or fall back to the Favicon or Gravatar, which need a commenter's email.

If niether Pavatar, Favicon or Gravatar are not enabled for 'email' and 'site', then algorithm fall back to the default avatar image, which you can specify using DEFAULT_AVATAR option in the settings.py.

All pavatars are cached during specified time period. Gravatars' caching is not realized yet.

Dependencies

This application depends on PIL -- Python Image Library and PIL must be build with JPEG and PNG (zlib) support.

On debian like systems, you need to install python-imaging package, or install development packages libjpeg-dev and zlib1g-dev (or something like that) if you wish to build PIL egg from the sources.

Installation

• Add application django_faces to the INSTALLED_APPS list.
• Run ./manage.py syncdb to create all neccessary tables.

• Add these variables to the settings.py:

  AUTHOR_AVATAR = 'images/author.jpg'          # site author's avatar
  DEFAULT_AVATAR = 'images/default_avatar.jpg' # default avatar image
                                               # it can be relative to MEDIA_URL
                                               # or absolute URL
  AVATARS_CACHE_DIR = 'cache/avatars'          # cache directory
  AVATARS_CACHE_DAYS = 1                       # how many days before
                                               # another avatar check
  AVATAR_SIZE = 50                             # avatar's size in pixels,
                                               # all images are resized to this size.
  AVATAR_DISCOVERY_ORDER = \
  ('pavatar', 'gravatar', 'favicon', 'default')
  DEFAULT_GRAVATAR = None                      # also, it can be 'monsterid' or 'identicon' or 'wavatar'

• Append django_faces.middleware.XPavatar line to the MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES to add X-Pavatar HTTP header or or use {% pavatar_html_link %} to your main template to add link HTML element.

Template tags

First os all, make tags import like this {% load faces_tags %}. After that, you can use these tags in you template.

pavatar_html_link

{% pavatar_html_link %} can be used instead of middleware to generate 'link' HTML element for pavatar.

author_block

This template tag can be used, to generate a simple HTML block with site's author's avatar. It is called without any parameters:

{% load faces_tags %} {% author_block %}

You can overload faces/author_block.html template, to modify look and feel of this block. This template's context contains following variables: avatar_url, author_name and contacts_url.

avatar

Use template tag {% avatar email site %} to create simple block with <img src="" /> for the email's and site's owner.

For example, I use following code, to show avatars on my site, which uses threaded comments and django-openid:

{% load faces_tags %}
<div class="b-avatar">
    {% avatar comment.user.email comment.user.openids.get.openid %}
</div>

Very simple, is't it?

To change avatar discovery order, set variable AVATAR_DISCOVERY_ORDER in your settings.py. By default it is a tuple ('pavatar', 'gravatar', 'favicon', 'default'), but you can use not only string identifiers, but also callables. Your custom function must accept site and email keyword arguments and return result of the call to urllib2.urlopen or a file-like object but with method geturl.