Back in August, I asked the following question: Why Is Gravatar Still Not Mainstream?. You folks supplied a wealth of answers to the question but many of the answers suggested something along the lines of making it easier to obtain a Gravatar through registration if they didn’t have one. While I’ve yet to see news on such an integration, there is a plugin that has been developed by Milan Dinic called Gravatar Signup Encouragement which enables you to encourage Gravatar registration to anyone who is not a registered member on your WordPress powered site.
Message can be shown to:
- unregistered commenters when they leave text input field for e-mail address
- registered commenters to whom their registered e-mail address is checked
- registered users on their profile page, to whom their registered e-mail address is checked
- users who fill registration form when they leave text input field for e-mail address
You can customize the message as you see fit. The plugin also provides flexibility in terms of where and when to display the message that encourages users to signup to Gravatar.
While it doesn’t do much for other services, this at least helps encourages those who are not registered users of Gravatar to perhaps create one for themselves with an easy to click link that takes them directly to the signup page. While it would be nice to have it integrated to the point where an end user can simply sign up right on the page they are on and afterwords, continue with their comment, this is a good start to get non Gravatar users familiar with the service.
