Show image next to the comment author if have certain role

Question

I want to create a badge image for comment author of a certain role, say, Editor. I want to style comments of users with the Editor role differently than comments of non-registered or lower-level users. For instance, I'd like to have an image appear next to his/her name.

I can do the whole thing in CSS, but I want a bit more flexibility so I can add more juice. How can I do it with a conditional tag? Any ideas?

Answer 1

Conditional tags are used to change content on the basis of what conditions a page meets. While there are no conditional tags depending on a user's role, this is how you can manipulate content depending on roles:

Display content to the user, depending on his role

<?php
   global $current_user;
   get_currentuserinfo(); //not strictly required, $current_user should be populated anyway 
   if(in_array('editor', $current_user->roles)) {
      // echo markup here
   }
?>

Alternatively, you might also want to check out current_user_can()

Edit: Display content based on a commentator's role

<?php
   $commentator_id = get_comment(get_comment_ID())->user_id;
   $commentator_info = get_userdata($commentator_id);
   $capabilities = $user_info->wp_capabilities;
   if (array_key_exists('editor', $capabilities)) {
      // echo markup here
   }
?>

The above will have to go in the comments loop.

Resources: get_comment() | get_user_data() | Comment Loop Beauty

Answer 2

Ok; so I found a 4 year old function that's never been committed to core:

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/5290/author-template-the_author_role.diff

... so my guess is that by using this; we can do a simple if statement in the loop to show something if the post author is in a role/capability; but not sure how that relates to comment authors.