Using a custom avatar backend

Django-machina has a built-in avatar system to get you started, but if your site uses a different avatar provider, you can modify django-machina to use that.

The first thing we must do is tell django-machina to ignore the built-in avatar system:

MACHINA_PROFILE_AVATARS_ENABLED = False

This will hide the avatar upload field from the user’s account page so they don’t upload the avatar to the wrong backend.

Now we have to modify the partial template partials/avatar.html to use our avatar provider. The template is passed the following two parameters:

• profile - A ForumProfile instance for the user (use profile.user to get the Django User)
• show_placeholder - A boolean telling the template whether or not to show a placeholder for users without an avatar

Example: using django-avatar

Here is an example template for django-avatar:

{% load avatar_tags %}
{% if profile.user|has_avatar %}
    <img class="avatar" src="{% avatar_url profile.user 260 %}" alt="{{ profile.user.username }}" />
{% elif show_placeholder %}
    <span class="avatar empty">
      <i class="far fa-user fa-4x" ></i>
    </span>
{% endif %}