author_images

This Pelican plugin adds support for author images and avatars. You may choose to display one or the other.

Configuration

Add the directory to the base plugins directory to PLUGIN_PATHS in pelicanconf.py, and then add author_images to the PLUGINS list. For example,

PLUGIN_PATHS = ["../git/pelican-plugins"]
PLUGINS = ['author_images']

You can also configure the directory for the author images and avatars. Note that both of these directories should exist in your theme, inside the static directory. This feels like the best way to approach this.

AUTHOR_AVATARS = 'images/author_avatars'
AUTHOR_IMAGES = 'images/author_images'

Adding images

Now you can place images and avatars into the correct places. The location for these is THEME / THEME_STATIC_DIR / AUTHOR_AVATARS. For instance, strudel/static/images/author_avatars for my particular setup. Note that in this case, strudel is my theme.

Naming images

Images have to named correctly for the plugin to find them. Currently, this means you need to take a sha256 of the authors name. The extension of the file can be one of svg, jpg, jpeg or png. For instance, my name is William Pettersson, so I can run

python -c 'import hashlib; print(hashlib.sha256("William Pettersson".encode("UTF-8")).hexdigest())'

to get the hash sum of my name. Then I just rename my images or avatars to have that name, but with the appropriate extension. For simplicity, there is a generate_hashsum.py which can also be used as follows

python generate_hashsum.py "William Pettersson"

which prints out a40249517dfaf4e83264ced7d802c9fe9b811c8425b1ce1b3e8b9e236b52fa3e. This means my files have to be named a40249517dfaf4e83264ced7d802c9fe9b811c8425b1ce1b3e8b9e236b52fa3e.png, or a40249517dfaf4e83264ced7d802c9fe9b811c8425b1ce1b3e8b9e236b52fa3e.jpg or similar.

Using in themes

These images and avatars are made available to themes through the author.avatar and author.image variables.