I recently updated the Monochrome Graffiti theme to support Gravatar but I thought I'd do a separate post on how to add support for it to your own themes. The good news is Graffiti already has support for Gravatar built it so all you need to do is add the image to your theme. Simply add the following line inside the #foreach($comment in $comments) loop in your post page.

$macros.gravatar($comment.Email, $comment.Username, $comment.IPAddress, "%{size ='60'}")

If the user doesn't have a Gravatar, it will automatically handle it and display a generic image. Of course, you can change the size attribute to make the image larger or smaller, but that's all there is to it. :)

I updated the Monochrome theme over the weekend to support Gravatar. If you don't know what Gravatar is, it's a globally recognized avatar. You can sign up with your email address at the Gravatar website and add an avatar. Then, every time you leave a comment on a blog supporting Gravatar, your avatar will appear next to it. Simple!

I also added a 'Similar Posts' section to the blog.post.view page. You can download the updated Monochrome theme from the Graffiti Themes page.

As I promised in the last post, here are a couple of bonus themes to end Theme Week. They are blue and orange variations of the PointSpace theme.

That brings the total available themes to download from my Graffiti Themes page to 10, so what are you waiting for? Give your Graffiti site a new look.

It's Friday, and the last day of Theme Week on RichMercer.com. To finish off the week, I give you GreenWay, a free, fully standards-compliant CSS template designed by Free CSS Templates. This free template is released under a Creative Commons Attributions 2.5 license, so you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want with it (even use it commercially) provided you keep the links in the footer intact.

You can download it from the Graffiti Themes page.

Also, look out for a couple of bonus themes later today.

Thursday's theme is called DeepBlue which was also originally created by Breezy New Media and is available for download from the Graffiti themes page.

Tomorrow is the last day of Theme Week and as well as the final theme of the week, there's going to be a special bonus.

Wednesday's theme is CrystalX, a theme created by Vít Dlouhý.

Download it from the Graffiti Themes page and look out tomorrow for the next theme.

Tuesday's download for Theme Week is called PointSpace and was originally created by Breezy New Media. It's available for download right now from the Graffiti themes page.

Again, I'd love to you hear from you if you have a theme you want converting to Graffiti. The best way is using the Contact Form.

This week is Theme Week on richmercer.com and here's Monday's theme. Called Clean&Green by Rambling Soul it has a minimal look with smooth graphics with shades of green and gray. It is released under Creative Commons 2.5 License.

You can download it now from the Graffiti themes page.

Also, I'd love to you hear from you if you have a theme you'd like to see converted to Graffiti. The best way is using the Contact form.

Look out for the next theme tomorrow!

As promised, you can now download the Monochrome theme for use on your Graffiti site. Orginally created by Rambling Soul, this theme is released under the Creative Commons 2.5 License.

You can download the theme from the Graffiti themes page.

P.S. Next week is theme week here on richmercer.com and I'll be releasing a new Graffiti theme each day. Keep checking back to get them as they're released but here's a sneak preview of Monday's theme, Clean&Green. 

Following on from the Flickr Widget I released yesterday, I have now created a Picasa Web Albums widget for Graffiti that will pull the latest photos from a users Picasa account. It works in very much the same way as the Flickr widget, although tag support is not included at this point (Picasa only allows you to filter by one tag at a time anyway).

You can download the widget here, which also contains a newer version of the Flickr widget containing some bug fixes and some performance enhancements.

After working with the Picasa Web Albums API for a new Graffiti widget, I thought I'd share this as I found a bunch of people that couldn't get square thumbnails from the API, but it's real easy when you know how. If you add 'thumbnail=72c' to the query string, you will received a cropped square image back. The 'c' signifies that the image will be cropped, and replace it with a 'u' for the un-cropped version.

i.e. http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/[username]/?kind=photo&thumbnail=72c

Although it's been available to download for a while (but slightly hard to find), I was never anywhere near happy with the quality of it. Well today, I'm publicly announcing the beta release of my FlickrWidget for Graffiti. The widget simply shows the latest photos from your Flickr page in the sidebar and it also lets you filter by tags. You can see it in action on the sidebar of this site.

Download it now and check it out. To install the widget, simply drop the RichMercer.Graffiti.Widgets.dll into your Graffiti sites' /bin folder then it should appear in the available list on the Widgets page. Then simply set your username and the number of photos to display. I'm going to add some more features soon (like caching) so watch out for an update.

I've just put the finishing touches to a new theme called Monochrome and I'm now using it on my site. The original theme was created by Roshan Ravi and I was originally going to just port it to Graffiti then release it, but I like it so much I'll be using it here too. Look out for another post when it's available to download at the Marketplace.

I know, I'm (very) late to the party, but since my last update, a lot has happened with Graffiti. It's now been released and you can download the free version or purchase it here. You can also read the press release over on the Telligent site. I'm really excited about Graffiti and can't wait to see where it will go in the future. I'll be releasing some new themes for it in the coming weeks as well as some Plug-ins.

I assure you the extra few days wait were worth it, but last night Graffiti CMS beta 1 hit the web! Everyone who signed up for the beta at Graffiticms.com should have received an email already with download details and setup instructions. If not, you can download the beta here, and an ever growing collection of documentation can be found here.

Personally, I think Graffiti is an amazing product and some of the early feedback from beta testers would suggest the same. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't already.

P.S. Of course, docs.graffiticms.com is powered by Graffiti so it's one great example of how it's not just a blogging platform. :)