Hovercards have already been enabled throughout WordPress.com and WordPress.org, and there is an official plugin in the works, but what if you can’t wait for the official plugin to add Hovercards to your WordPress blog?

If your theme has a functions.php file, just add the following line within the file:

wp_enqueue_script( 'gprofiles', 'http://s.gravatar.com/js/gprofiles.js', array( 'jquery' ), 'e', true );

If your theme doesn’t have a functions.php file, or you’d rather not mess with it, use a plain text editor to create a file called hovercards.php with the following content, then use an FTP or SFTP client to upload it to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, and activate it via the Plugins section of the admin panel.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Hovercards
*/
wp_enqueue_script( 'gprofiles', 'http://s.gravatar.com/js/gprofiles.js', array( 'jquery' ), 'e', true );
?>

Credit for the above code goes entirely to Otto and Alex. It is not official and not supported, so you should probably switch over to Gravatar’s official plugin when it’s released, but at least this will hold you over until then.

What do you think of the new Hovercard feature? Will you be adding it to your blog?

Update: The code listed above, while leaner, enables Hovercards everywhere (including the admin panel), which may not be a desired outcome for some users. If you find this to be a tad bit annoying, Otto’s code properly displays Hovercards on the blog side only.

Same Idea Exists Today From 2004

Doing a bit of history, Gravatar has been around since at least 2004. At least that is as far back as the Web Archive has records of it which makes it all the more surprising that more services and software do not support it out of the box. For example, Twitter, Facebook, phpBB, all have their own way of handling avatars. No support what so ever for the Gravatar service, even though there are numerous examples of how to implement it.

Could it be that we are really better off with each system managing avatars in their own way? Or is it the fact that most end users of various software and or services have not spoken loudly enough to have Gravatar support built in? My request is for software developers not to ditch their own avatar management solution, but to build Gravatar support in addition to. At least in this fashion, you could gauge how popular the use of Gravatar is to manage avatars on your software/service compared to your home grown solution opting to use one, the other, or both.

Gravatar is now hosted under the guide of Automattic, a company that has proven with WordPress.com that they know what they’re doing when it comes to scalability and server infrastructure. Users of bbPress, WordPress.com, and the self installed version of WordPress are spoiled to have Gravatar support built right into the software. To this day, I don’t think the Gravatar idea has come to fruition which is why I’m asking you to contact the developers of your favorite software or services which has its own version of avatar management and let them know you want Gravatar support to be built in. At the very least, a mod or plugin to add the functionality to the software should suffice.

If you participate in this event, be sure to let me know the response you receive in the comments below. Also feel free to link to plugins or mods that add Gravatar support to their respective pieces of software as it would be nice to have all of that information in one place.