[buddypress-trac] [BuddyPress Trac] #5715: Profile image placeholders

[buddypress-trac]

#5715: Profile image placeholders
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 Reporter:  sooskriszta                          |       Owner:
     Type:  enhancement                          |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal                               |   Milestone:  Future
Component:  Appearance - Template Pack           |  Release
 Severity:  normal                               |     Version:
 Keywords:  has-patch needs-testing dev-         |  Resolution:
  feedback                                       |
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Comment (by boonebgorges):

 Aesthetically, I like this much better than Gravatar's fallbacks
 (mysteryman, etc).

 We'd need to think carefully about character sets. How does this work in
 non-Latin scripts? Alphabetic scripts (Cyrillic, Greek, etc) should just
 need another set of first letters. I don't know enough about names in non-
 alphabetic scripts to know how/whether something similar could work.

 Is it possible to build the letters dynamically, instead of shipping a
 directory of images? (Especially since those images would need to include
 other scripts.) Maybe use a font + CSS? Or maybe package a library that
 builds SVGs or CSS to represent characters?

 As DJPaul notes, we'd need to think carefully about how/whether the
 feature would integrate with Gravatar. Maybe the easiest option is a
 toggle that disables Gravatar in favor of the letters. More sophisticated
 is a workflow like this: if a user has a local avatar, use it; else if the
 user has a Gravatar, use it; else use the letter. The main problem here is
 that we want to avoid calls to gravatar.com, so we'd want to cache the
 fact that a user doesn't have a Gravatar. But if a user who doesn't have a
 Gravatar then creates one, we need to bust our local cache of their
 Gravatarlessness.

 It'd also be nice to allow users to set their own background color.

 Perhaps as a first pass, this could be built as a plugin that is an
 alternative to Gravatar. This would give us a chance to explore some of
 the issues discussed above.

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Ticket URL: <https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5715#comment:8>
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