django-avatar

Django-avatar is a reusable application for handling user avatars. It has the ability to default to Gravatar if no avatar is found for a certain user. Django-avatar automatically generates thumbnails and stores them to your default file storage backend for retrieval later.

Using django-avatar

Basics

To integrate django-avatar with your site, there are relatively few things that are required. A minimal integration can work like this:

1. List this application in the INSTALLED_APPS portion of your settings file. Your settings file will look something like:

   INSTALLED_APPS = (
       # ...
       'avatar',
   )
   

2. Add the pagination urls to the end of your root urlconf. Your urlconf will look something like:

   urlpatterns = patterns('',
       # ...
       (r'^avatar/', include('avatar.urls')),
   )
   

3. Somewhere in your template navigation scheme, link to the change avatar page:

   <a href="{% url 'avatar_change' %}">Change your avatar</a>
   

4. Wherever you want to display an avatar for a user, first load the avatar template tags:

   {% load avatar_tags %}
   

   Then, use the avatar tag to display an avatar of a default size:

   {% avatar user %}
   

   Or specify a size (in pixels) explicitly:

   {% avatar user 65 %}
   

5. Optionally customize avatar/change.html and avatar/confirm_delete.html to conform to your site's look and feel.

Views

There are only two views for this application: one for changing a user's avatar, and another for deleting a user's avatar.

Changing an avatar

The actual view function is located at avatar.views.change, and this can be referenced by the url name avatar_change. It takes two keyword arguments: extra_context and next_override. If extra_context is provided, that context will be placed into the template's context.

If next_override is provided, the user will be redirected to the specified URL after form submission. Otherwise the user will be redirected to the URL specified in the next parameter in request.POST. If request.POST has no next parameter, request.GET will be searched. If request.GET has no next parameter, the HTTP_REFERER header will be inspected. If that header does not exist, the user will be redirected back to the current URL.

Deleting an avatar

The actual view function is located at avatar.views.delete, and this can be referenced by the url name avatar_delete. It takes the same two keyword arguments as avatar.views.change and follows the same redirection rules as well.

Template Tags

To begin using these template tags, you must first load the tags into the template rendering system:

{% load avatar_tags %}

{% avatar_url user [size in pixels] %}

Renders the URL of the avatar for the given user. User can be either a django.contrib.auth.get_user_model() object instance or a username.

{% avatar user [size in pixels] %}

Renders an HTML img tag for the given user for the specified size. User can be either a django.contrib.auth.get_user_model() object instance or a username.

{% render_avatar avatar [size in pixels] %}

Given an actual avatar.models.Avatar object instance, renders an HTML img tag to represent that avatar at the requested size.

Global Settings

There are a number of settings available to easily customize the avatars that appear on the site. Listed below are those settings:

AVATAR_GRAVATAR_BASE_URL

The base URL where to get avatars at gravatar.com. Defaults to http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/.

AUTO_GENERATE_AVATAR_SIZES

An iterable of integers representing the sizes of avatars to generate on upload. This can save rendering time later on if you pre-generate the resized versions. Defaults to (80,)

AVATAR_RESIZE_METHOD

The method to use when resizing images, based on the options available in PIL. Defaults to Image.ANTIALIAS.

AVATAR_STORAGE_DIR

The directory under MEDIA_ROOT to store the images. If using a non-filesystem storage device, this will simply be appended to the beginning of the file name.

AVATAR_GRAVATAR_BACKUP

A boolean determining whether to default to the Gravatar service if no Avatar instance is found in the system for the given user. Defaults to True.

AVATAR_DEFAULT_URL

The default URL to default to if AVATAR_GRAVATAR_BACKUP is set to False and there is no Avatar instance found in the system for the given user.

Management Commands

This application does include one management command: rebuild_avatars. It takes no arguments and, when run, re-renders all of the thumbnails for all of the avatars for the pixel sizes specified in the AUTO_GENERATE_AVATAR_SIZES setting.