While my commenting system of choice is Disqus, however there are some people I know, who for whatever reason, don’t like Disqus and still use WordPress’ native commenting system to handle their blog’s community. This tip is for all of you.

If you are using WordPress native comments your blog already supports people’s Gravatars by identifying their email address as they comment. Well WordPress is rolling out a new feature for Gravatar called Hovercards, which is a cool feature that allows you to see more of how people are interacting socially. While the official plugin is still in the works, Otto on WordPress came up with a temporary plugin solution for those of you that can’t wait.

Otto actually wrote code that creates and calls in a plugin but since it’s unsupported for now we’re going to skip the plugin code and just edit a line in your functions.php file since that doesn’t require you to even FTP anything.

In your WordPress Dashboard go to Appearance > Editor and choose your theme and then click on the functions.php file in the right. You should see the file show up in the editor and once you do just add this line of code to the bottom of it:

wp_enqueue_script( 'gprofiles', 'http://s.gravatar.com/js/gprofiles.js', array( 'jquery' ), 'e', true );

Once you’re done, hit the Update File button and you’re done. The next time someone leaves a comment connected to their Gravatar account you’ll be able to hover over it and find out a lot more about the people leaving comments on your blog.

Special thanks to Otto and Alex for coming up with this quick fix for those of you who can’t wait until the official plugin is out.

Note: once the official plugin is release and you install it, be sure to go back in to your functions.php file and remove the line of code you added to make sure there aren’t any wires crossed.