DanielAGW

Thanks hjun, I’m glad you find it useful too.

It’s already deleted. Every file connected with the plugin is located in plugin folder. If the folder does not exist any more, there are no leftovers. The only thing that was still there was the entry in DB with default avatar. After you have changed it, there is nothing left.

Just to make sure, check if there is wp-first-letter-avatar folder in your plugins directory. If it is not there, it means that there are no leftovers.

Daniel

After you uninstalled? Maybe it’s a leftover after the plugin default avatar. Please go to Settings > Discussion page in your WordPress admin dashboard and set Mystery man as a default avatar. You can also set it to Identicon/Wavatar or any other. Probably there is none selected currently.
This problem has been removed in recent plugin release.

Please let me know if that helped.

That’s great news, thanks. Well, I’m going to remove this feature in the next release. It’s all because of the default avatar setting on Settings > Discussion page. I guess it is causing some problems…

I’m marking this one as resolved – next release will include the fix.

Thank you for your help, Joe.

Hi,
I decided to go with the option to allow users to change filter priority. The feature is now integrated in my development version. When the next version of my plugin is released, you can freely update it and then go to plugin settings and change the filter priority. By default it is 10, so if you want your other avatar plugin to be executed AFTER my plugin, just go to my plugin settings and change the filter priority from 10 to 9 (or any other lower value).

The update should be released sometime next week (probably around Friday-Saturday).

Thanks for bringing this up.

Cheers,
Daniel

Guys, I’ve been testing plugin for two hours in various environments and I cannot recreate this error. Everything works flawlessly for me. I have latest BuddyPress, latest WordPress and BuddyPress First Letter Avatar 1.0.3 (latest). Every user gets their own avatar – whether it’s letter A or B or C or D, everything just works. I cannot think of anything that could by causing it.

What PHP versions are you guys using?

I have one suspicion regarding where this may be coming from. Your problem is that the filter that adds default avatar works (which is just a letter A), but the other filter that is actually responsible for replacing avatars with some logic behind it doesn’t work. The only way that I can think of that may be causing this is because of line 66 in my code. There is a condition that checks default avatar in database and if the condition is not met, the function (constructor) returns nothing (ends plugin execution).

The important part:
If any of you guys experiencing the problem know just a tiny bit PHP and is willing to help me debug this issue, please contact me at: danielagw.wp AT outlook DOT com. All it takes is just print (var_dump or echo) two variables in one place of the code and tell me what they look like. It won’t take longer than 1 minute. If I know what these two variables look like, I will probably be able to solve this problem.
So if any of you have spare 1 minute to help open source community it would be highly appreciated ??

Okay guys, I see the problem seems to be escalating, so there must be something I’m missing. Good to know that 1.0.2 works – it gives me a good starting point in my debugging process. Interesting that the more popular non-BuddyPress version of this plugin, WP First Letter Avatar seems to be working without this issue. Their core is basically the same…
I’ll do my best to find the problem and eliminate it as soon as possible.

Thanks for all reports.

Daniel

EDIT: If somebody has problems locating 1.0.2 version, I’ve started a new sticky thread to make it easier – IMPORTANT – Only letter A showing up

That’s interesting. And I don’t know what is more interesting – the fact that it works for me without any problems or the fact that 1.0.2 doesn’t have this problem. I didn’t do any radical changes in 1.0.3, and I can’t think of any small modification that could be causing this… I’ll look into this again. Thanks for the info.

Hi,
Updating the avatar works – just hit Browse, navigate to your avatar file and then click Update profile. The new avatar is saved in DB, but it is not displayed, because it is filtered from the very beginning by WP First Letter Avatar. But it is saved properly and will work after you deactivate my plugin.

I looked into it and, honestly, I don’t think it is a good idea to add compatibility between these two plugins. They both work exactly the same way – they filter WP get_avatar hook, so they both work against each other. The one which gets executed later wins, the one that was executed earlier has no effect.

There are many avatar plugins for WordPress and they all store their avatars differently, so I would have to include them all in my code, so that my code would “give way” to them all. Including all this exclusions is of course impossible, but even if it was – I don’t think it is a good idea. I think you should decide on one avatar system. WP First Letter Avatar gives you two options – look for Gravatar first, if no Gravatar found – use first letter avatar. If you want to add custom users avatar to the equation, that would be 3 options already available for just displaying the avatar. Prioritizing all these options to make them work in every environment (including compatibilty with other plugins that may interfere with them) would be a nightmare. So if you ask me, I think you should just decide on one avatar system/plugin. Having more of them is just like having multiple cache or SEO plugins – they will only get in each other’s way and nothing good will come out of this.

However…
If you really want to have WP First Letter Avatar + custom users avatar, with custom avatars having priority over letter avatars, you may want to try a small tweak. Because both plugins use get_avatar filter and it happens that they both use the same priority value (10), you can modify it in PHP file. So you can either decrease the priority of my plugin or increase the priority of the other avatar plugin.
First option:
Go to lines 80 and 85 of wp-first-letter-avatar.php in wp-first-letter-avatar plugin dir and change the 10 parameter in add_filter() functions to 9. You need to change it in these two lines.
Second option:
Go to line 73 of init.php file in basic-user-avatars plugin dir and change the 10 parameter in add_filter() functions to 11.

After this modification, it will work the way you want it to work. User avatar first, if no avatar chosen by the user – WP First Letter Avatar takes over the avatar filter.

I may consider adding a Priority field in plugin settings. That way advanced users could adjust priority of filter execution to make them compatible with any plugin that may interfere with their functionality (increase or decrease the priority). But I’m still not too sure about it; other plugins don’t have this feature.
Really, from my experience – two plugins hooking into the same functions to get the same results, will always be problematic and should be avoided as much as possible.

I hope you find this explanation satisfying!

Cheers,
Dan

Fantastic, thanks for letting me know.

Cheers,
Dan

Yes, of course. Sorry, I forgot about this thread. Thanks for quick reaction.

Thanks for the report. I will do my best to look into this as soon as possible, but I have very busy schedule currently. I will look into this before the end of the week.

Just a thought, but would security software have something to do with it, like the plugin wants to do something and the software isn’t letting it?

Very unlikely.

This is the first time I’m getting this kind of report, so it’s difficult for me to say where the problem may be. It seems that hooks are not activated properly – not only the avatar filter does not work (because your avatar is set to the A letter, which should only be seen in Settings page), but also it seems that CSS is not attached properly. But the CSS thing may just be the fact that some other styles is overriding my CSS rules.

I cannot see any other way of getting into the root of the problem other than disabling all other plugins to see if it changes anything.

Does Chrome/Firefox console give you any errors? Missing CSS/JS files, some 404 errors somewhere? If you want you can send me your website address to danielagw.wp AT outlook DOT com so I could take a quick look to see if files are enclosed properly etc.

I do not take user name from any of the fields. I use alt attribute of the avatar (<img .../> tag), where user name is included. BuddyPress does not provide any convenient way to get user’s data when filtering avatars (unlike core WordPress functionality).

At the end of first foreach segment in set_buddypress_avatar() function I have user’s name already extracted (in the $name variable). You could try to use user’s name to find some other info on this user (and possibly get to fields you need). I can’t help you any further – you have to figure out how to do it.

Hello,
With JavaScript option enabled, plugin should not cause any performance issues. If there are any, they should not be longer than 0,1 seconds. Do you have a cache plugin activated? I received one report from a user who says that having cache plugin activated (W3TC to be specific) caused noticable performance issues with my plugin.