Theia's improved avatar manager « home
posted on 21:16 - 10 April 2010 | posted by Lev
It's official - the coming version of Theia (1.0.0b7 - TBA) will have a much nicer interface for managing avatars! 
For various design reasons, it has become necessary to ensure that avatars not only have a fixed width, but a fixed height (still, left to the administrator of the Theia installation to decide). Many aspects of Theia have not been using avatars where they otherwise would have made a nicer complement than mere members names in a list. The biggest reason for this is simply because when one avatar is larger than another, the design consistency can suffer quite a bit.
Since I didn't want to make adding an avatar more complicated than it should be - such as by requiring folks to first crop and resize their avatar before uploading it - the solution became very clear: implement a cropping system within Theia itself!
And that's what I've done. Thanks to Jcrop (a sweet little plug-in to jQuery), the next release of Theia will allow the end-user to crop their avatar directly through your site (resizing is still done automatically at various sizes since the administrator can decide how large these sizes should be and where the different sizes should be used).
Oh, and kudos to Mike Alsup for writing the jQuery form plug-in that makes uploading files in the background possible!
Here's how it will look (as seen on TT):
For various design reasons, it has become necessary to ensure that avatars not only have a fixed width, but a fixed height (still, left to the administrator of the Theia installation to decide). Many aspects of Theia have not been using avatars where they otherwise would have made a nicer complement than mere members names in a list. The biggest reason for this is simply because when one avatar is larger than another, the design consistency can suffer quite a bit.
Since I didn't want to make adding an avatar more complicated than it should be - such as by requiring folks to first crop and resize their avatar before uploading it - the solution became very clear: implement a cropping system within Theia itself!
And that's what I've done. Thanks to Jcrop (a sweet little plug-in to jQuery), the next release of Theia will allow the end-user to crop their avatar directly through your site (resizing is still done automatically at various sizes since the administrator can decide how large these sizes should be and where the different sizes should be used).
Oh, and kudos to Mike Alsup for writing the jQuery form plug-in that makes uploading files in the background possible!
Here's how it will look (as seen on TT):
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