Plugins

Had a conversation with fujin earlier about basic Gravatar support into feather-comments. It unfortunately deals with details that I consider pertinent, and feel we should get a opinion on as a whole.

Option 1) (what Github does), Check if they have a Gravatar image (perhaps a flag stored in a database, don't know, don't care) and then , of course this includes more detail in our view. We have to check if they have a gravatar image, and if they do display it, if they don't, don't display it. Complexity that I am not a big fan of. I'm sure there is ways to improve on this, but I consider this 'heavy' as a whole.

Option 2) When a comment is made, a do_later is called to check if the email address given in the Comment Email Field has a Gravatar, and if it does fetch the image and store it locally. Now of course this is not exactly 'light' however I personally find it more render friendly if I can go into detail.

For example, comment is made and the user has no gravatar at all, we can then symlink a 'dummy' image to their email address and the becomes a dummy image, no extra disk space is used, and either a HTTP 302 is sent, or the image is sent.

More so, they have a gravatar, the do_later is called, we fetch the gravatar and store it appropriately, and it is displayed without any <% if %> <% else %> etc...

In option 2 I mention a hashing scheme, a rather 'bushy' schema that basically is

tld ->

domain ->

firstportionofemailaddress

So you have

public/files/com/gmail/fujin.jpg

public/files/com/gmail/dumbo.jpg

public/files/dk/livid/damm.jpg

The idea is, if you have 1000 comments for one article, that's 1000 images in your files/images/gravatar folder, now you compound that by 500 articles with the same amount and you have a crapload of images. However in a bushy schema, you can prune and symlink it to the dummy image to save disk space and inodes easily. Let's say you have 5000 google users.

Well then you can replace all the google gravatar's with the dummy, or a google logo, or however you want postmortem.

... The goal of this, is a discussion of how we should, or not implement this. Of course this support will go into feather-comments code. I imagine it will stir up ideas, and well that's the goal.

For the sake of sakes, no one is responsible for now btw.