How to change my user avatar?
Avatars are simply graphical icons that allows the user to identify themselves in WordPress or your bbPress forums. At the moment bbPress allows you to change your avatar using Gravatar by default. This guide will hopefully help you using Gravatar and also lead you to a plugin alternative to Gravatar.
Upload an Avatar with a Plugin
There are a ton of plugins from the WordPress plugins directory that include some kind of avatar upload functionality.Some plugins that support bbPress could be membership/social network feature filled plugins like BuddyPress, or are just simple avatar upload plugins like Basic User Avatars.
Upload an Avatar using Gravatar
Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars that identify a user. The service is used in many areas across the web such as online forums like bbpress.org, chat-rooms, comment systems, other WordPress websites, or any many other online communities.
The service at the website gravatar.com stores all of your Gravatars in one central place, to use on the sites that you want. Gravatars can become very handy especially when you access another WordPress site and comment on a blog post. Using the same email you used when signing up for Gravatar.com, after posting your comment your new Gravatar will show up.
Gravatar is already integrated with your WordPress site for use for bbPress or WordPress comments.
You can customize the avatar settings at the very bottom in Settings > Discussion to
- Disable avatars entirely
- Change the rating of your site’s avatars. Gravatar allows the user to rate each avatar they upload. Modifying this setting allows only avatars of the set rating to be displayed.
- Choose the default avatar/show no avatar for all for users that did not upload an avatar using Gravatar.
Using the generated gravatars look pretty nice and are unique to each user instead of using the default mystery person.
Using blank as your default avatar choice will not render a default avatar from Gravatar.
Disabling avatars is nice if you do not want to worry about users uploading them and you want a semi-anonymous community.
To upload an avatar using Gravatar:
- Go to Gravatar.com
- Click the Create Your Own Gravatar button
- You now be directed to a registration form, this will create you a wordpress.com account. If you already have a wordpress.com account, click the link above the form.
- After creating your account, You will redirected to the My Gravatars page to manage your gravatars for each email you add.
- If you haven’t added a Gravatar yet, you will see a message with a link to add a new Gravatar.
- After clicking the link to add a new avatar, you will sent to a screen to upload your new Gravatar image by either from your computer, an external url, and a webcam. After uploading a few images you can also upload a photo from your past uploads.
- After uploading your image you can now crop the photo then rate it, and now the image you uploaded should be your new gravatar to the email it is assigned.
- You can add a new image or an email address by hovering over your avatar to the right of your email address.
