position: relative;

There are a number of plugins and tutorials for adding a gravatar image to the meta info for WordPress posts.  But my client wanted the ability for each other to upload/maintain their own images within their WordPress profiles. Here’s how I did it.

First  I installed the plugin Author Image – this places a simple upload box at the bottom of a user’s profile page. Nice and simple.

Next, I used the code snippet provided for the plugin and added it to the .entry-meta section beside the author link in my template page:

<?php the_author_image(); ?>

I styled it to make it smaller, but again this was an easy task. Next, I wanted to make the image link to the author’s posts page – that proved to be harder than expected, but eventually I got it working thanks to a post I found about an outdated user image plugin:

<?php
$author_id=$post->post_author;
$curuser = get_userdata($author_id);
$author_post_url=get_author_posts_url($curuser->ID, $curuser->nicename);
echo 'user_nicename ) . '" ' . '>';
the_author_image();
echo '';
?>

Easy to implement and my client’s authors can control their image from within their profile rather than having to update a gravatar.