So, after my success the other day wrestling WP-OpenID into the ground, I thought it was about time to revisit another one of my LJ-to-WP integration plugins, Also LJ Avatar.
This plugin’s idea is great but I’ve always been a bit bleh on the specifics; particularly, I don’t like the way users have to format their names as username@server-without-extension in order to be picked up. I always figured it would make much more sense (and better integration with OpenID) to read off a supplied URL than a name. I also had issues with ALA when I first installed it due to its reliance on remote includes. This was patched pretty quickly with cURL, but the plugin still kept a couple of narky behaviours like not caching images due to a reliance on system().
Hrm.
So this morning, in between loads of washing, I gutted the plugin, re-wrote most of the regexps and logic, replaced wget with cURL and ended up with Avalicious!.
Similar to ALA, Avalicious! hooks off get_avatar in WordPress. It reads out a commenter’s URL, and if it matches one of its internal list of known LiveJournal Server sites, it returns that user’s default avatar. If that doesn’t work, it fails out neatly with whatever avatar it was passed in the first place (Gravatar by default, but it could theoretically be something else if you’re running other plugins).
It works with users and communities for LiveJournal, InsaneJournal, DeadJournal, JournalFen, Dreamwidth and Inksome.
Awesome.