Integrating Tridion with Gravatar

Lately I’ve worked on a Gravatar library for .NET which I released in July. I have also recently had the chance to work on Tridion GUI extensions for a customer.

This got me thinking; wouldn’t it be cool to integrate the two? Almost immediately I thought; yes, it will be cool!

So I’ve set to work on a nice GUI extension that will bring Gravatar to Tridion users and give the GUI a bit of a social touch make it feel more personalized by displaying a personalized photo for each user.

And so the integration is really 3 different extensions that can be each used individually or together.

Current User Photo

The first integration shows the Gravatar photo for the current user logged on to the Content Manager Explorer:

Announcing Gravatar.NET

Introduction

For a while now I’ve been working on an implementation of the Gravatar public API.

Unfortunately it took longer than I had intended, what with those pesky work commitments and personal life issues…

I’m glad to tell you that Gravatar.NET is now available for download on Codeplex.

If you don’t know what Gravatar is, it’s: “A Globally Recognized Avatar”, allowing you to store a personal image (or images) and reuse it across different websites that support the use of it (example: WordPress.com).

If you’re building a website that includes storing user account information, and let’s face it, what website doesn’t do that these days, then typically one of the things your users expect is to be able to associate a photo to recognize their account on the site. Instead of having to store and manage these photos on your server (sometimes with a bandwidth/storage limit), Gravatar can do it for you.