When I was laying out the groundwork for this site, one thing I wanted to have was an avatar per author. Not only are these mini-pictures cool to look at, but they provide instant identification as to the author of a post. I figured it’d be really easy to implement when the time came so I didn’t worry about it. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case. After many hours of trying to figure out how to tweak the wordpress code, I stumbled on a site that had a dirty - yet effective - solution to this problem.

• Step 1. rename the avatar to coincide with the author’s name. For example, author “CheeseBall” would name his image CheeseBall.* where * is the designated picture extension (jpg, gif, png, etc.)
• 
  Step 2. upload the avatar to the web site’s image directory. Unless you’ve restructured the directories, it should be located here: wp-content\themes\yourtheme\images
• 
  Step 3. locate the main loop - which should look something like this (the while part is what we’re interested in finding):

  • <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

• 
  Step 4. place the following code somewhere AFTER the loop:

  • <img class="author-avatar"
    src="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/<?php the_author() ?>.*"
    alt="Author"/>

• I’m not 100% as to what the above code does, but here’s my take on what’s happening. First the php bloginfo() function is called and somehow locates the stylesheet directory
  (ex: wp-content\themes\yourtheme\) and proceeds to the images\ directory. Then the picture is grabbed based on the author’s name (ex: CheeseBall) and the file extension (change the * to jpg, gif, etc.).
• 
  Step 5. customize via CSS.

Simple as that. Not the most elegant way of doing things, but I thought it was pretty clever.