But wait, can’t we just require members to use Gravatar?

Gravatar is a service of “Globally Recognized Avatars” used across many sites including WordPress, Disqus, Stack Overflow, and GitHub.

In my experience working with membership sites, I’ve found the use of Gravatar to be very audience-specific. Luckily it is easy to determine your audience’s adoption of this avatar service.

Navigate to “Users” in your WordPress admin. Do most people have a unique avatar or do most have the “Mystery Man” (or whichever default avatar you’ve set under Settings > Discussion)?

If you find that you’re serving an audience that doesn’t use Gravatar, you have two choices: make them sign up for Gravatar or use one of the recommended plugins below to allow custom avatars for your membership site.

All of the plugins filter the built in WordPress avatar features. This means that they should be compatible with other plugins that display avatars, including our Membership Directory and Profile Pages add on, as well as BuddyPress and bbPress.

Simple Local Avatars

Until recently, this plugin was my go-to for local avatars. The plugin was written by Jake Goldman (@jakemgold) and the team at 10up.

Simple Local Avatar’s default avatar upload form is automatically placed on the “Edit User” page, whether you are using a plugin like Theme My Login (for front-end user profiles) or the standard WordPress “Edit User” admin.

The plugin has two simple settings available on the “Settings” > “Discussion” WordPress admin page: Local Avatars Only and Local Upload Permissions. These settings allow you to control whether to fall back to the user’s Gravatar or to control avatar upload permissions based on user role.

Screenshots

Why not to use this plugin.

I’m not going to steer users away from this plugin, because it does a simple thing fairly well. The issue with the current release is an incompatibility with the “Themed Profiles” module of Theme My Login (a plugin we currently recommend for membership sites).

Here’s a patch to enable the use Simple Local Avatars in conjunction with Theme My Login.

I’ve also seen a few “undefined variable” notices that may or may not be visible on your site (depending on your host and wp-config settings). And, unlike the next plugin I’ll discuss, Simple Local Avatars lacks flexibility with the placement of the “Avatar” update form.

WP User Avatar

This plugin is written by Flipper Code. I love the shortcode feature that embeds the avatar upload form in any page or post, not just the “Edit User” WordPress admin page.

Important Notes

If you want your “subscriber” role members (the default role that most members of your site will have) to be able to manage their avatar, do the following:

1. Navigate to “Avatars” > “Settings” in your WordPress admin.
2. Under “Settings” check the box to “Allow Contributors & Subscribers to upload avatars”

The [avatar_upload] Shortcode

This plugin includes a shortcode that you can use to place the avatar upload form in any page. The default avatar upload form is automatically placed on the “Edit User” page, whether you are using a plugin like Theme My Login to have frontend user profile editing, or the standard WordPress admin profile edit page.

Screenshots

Using this Plugin with Paid Memberships Pro

If your membership site is built on Paid Memberships Pro, it is easy to add this upload form to your membership account page. See the code recipe below:

Using this Plugin with the Memberlite Theme

Here’s a little CSS that improves the appearance of this plugin with the Memberlite Theme. Copy and paste this code into your Memberlite Child Theme’s style.css file:

.wpua-edit-container {margin: 0 0 2rem 0; }
.wpua-edit-container input[type=file] {width: auto; }
.wpua-edit-container #wpua-upload-button-existing {background: #EEE; padding: 1rem; margin: .5rem 0;}
.wpua-edit-container #wpua-upload-messages-existing, .wpua-edit-container #wpua-upload-messages-existing code {font-size: 1.2rem; font-style: italic; }
.wpua-edit-container #wpua-remove-button-existing button, .wpua-edit-container #wpua-undo-button-existing button {background: none; color: #2C3E50 !important; font-size: 1.4rem; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; }
.wpua-edit-container #wpua-remove-button-existing, .wpua-edit-container #wpua-undo-button-existing {margin: 0; }

Basic User Avatars

This plugin is a forked and enhanced version of Simple Local Avatars written by Jared Aitchison (@jaredatch). This awesome plugin includes a shortcode feature to embed the avatar upload form in any page or post.

The plugin has one setting available on the “Settings” > “Discussion” WordPress admin page: Local Upload Permissions. This setting allows you to control avatar upload permissions based on user role.

The [basic-user-avatars] Shortcode

Just like WP User Avatar, this plugin includes a shortcode that you can use to place the avatar upload form in any page. The default avatar upload form is automatically placed on the “Edit User” page, whether you are using a plugin like Theme My Login to have frontend user profile editing, or the standard WordPress admin profile edit page.

Screenshots

Using this Plugin with Paid Memberships Pro

If your membership site is built on Paid Memberships Pro, it is easy to add this upload form to your membership account page. See the code recipe below:

Using this Plugin with the Memberlite Theme

Here’s a little CSS that improves the appearance of this plugin with the Memberlite Theme. Copy and paste this code into your Memberlite Child Theme’s style.css file:

#basic-user-avatar-form .description {font-size: 1.2rem; font-style: italic; margin-top: 1rem; }

Just make them use Gravatar!

If you don’t want to host local avatars for your members, you can simply direct your members to create a Gravatar.

Using Gravatars with Paid Memberships Pro

The main PMPro plugin doesn’t have any frontend user avatar features. But your membership site may have members only comment areas or other plugins that display avatars (a few are outlined above).

The code recipe below hooks into the membership account page “Profile” section, adding the user avatar display and a link to update at Gravatar.

Screenshot

Other Things to Consider

If you are using other plugins that have social features (such as BuddyPress) there may be a “clash of the titans” in terms of who controls the avatar. We’ll keep testing integration of these recommend plugins.

If you have a known incompatibility with any of these local avatars options for your membership site, please post a comment below.