Tips and Tricks

Automatically clone theme menu location to display different menus based on login status

Chad Butler · Nov 21, 2013 ·

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One of the most common questions that I receive is how to display menu items based on login status. Because there truly are several answers with multiple options, it an become a little confusing, even to more advanced users. It really boils down to how to you want to construct your site and how do you want things to work?

I have provided different methods of doing this in the past, but that was often difficult for some users because you really needed to understand how to set up a child theme and do theme customizations appropriately. That is not easily within reach of all users.

So I have put together a plugin extension to make this process more automatic. Now you can handle everything through the WP Menus admin panel. It will automatically clone any menu areas of your theme, thus providing you with the ability to serve different menus for those menu areas based on whether a user is logged in or not.

Add a custom tab to the WP-Members admin panel to send test emails to the administrator

Chad Butler · Nov 11, 2013 ·

I had a user request some time ago to allow the plugin to send test emails to the administrator so that so a site owner could test both email functionality and view the content of each email without going through the hassle of doing a test registration each time. I thought that sounded like a great idea.

This was originally offered to users as a code snippet, but has since grown into an extension package for the plugin. The extension will add a tab to the WP-Members admin panel where you can ask the plugin to send test emails to you for review. Continue Reading →

Generic Header Login as a Widget

Chad Butler · Oct 12, 2013 ·

Using the generic header login HTML as a starting point, I created a header login widget. This can be used in themes that have a header widget area where the sidebar widget might not fit well.

Consider this a framework to start from. The code for the form as well as the CSS for styling for form can be customized to fit your theme’s needs. I’ve added lots of comments in the code snippets so you can follow how it is being done. Continue Reading →

Fighting registration spam with a honey pot

Chad Butler · Aug 3, 2013 ·

I’ve had a few requests for help with combating registration spam using the plugin. To be honest, I’m right there with you all – I was getting a great deal of registration spam here on the site. I’ve been working on how to reduce that with a number of approaches.

One approach is the Security extension which has settings to set up black lists. But blocking IP addresses needs to be done with caution. Many spammers are not spamming from their own machines. Some of it comes from innocent victims with compromised systems.

Another possible solution that can work well is to use what is known as a “honey pot.” This is essentially a trap that the spam bot puts its hand into and is trapped. That is the method I will describe here.

Continue Reading →

Dynamic redirect to referrer in login

Chad Butler · Aug 2, 2013 ·

I have a challenge creating a title for this tutorial, so to describe what it covers, I recently had a question regarding how to dynamically put a redirect back to the original content into the link to the login page. In this instance, the user had customized how they were using the plugin and rather than having the login in place of blocked content as is the default, they had a link to the login page. Continue Reading →