Tips and Tricks

Utility function to determine if a user registration is pending with the PayPal addon

Chad Butler · May 3, 2013 ·

For users that are diving into customizing their installation and using the PayPal addon, here is a utility function that will allow you to determine if a registered user is pending (i.e. they have not yet paid). This can be useful for content display that you may intend for any registered user regardless of payment status, or some other use.

I use this function on the rocketgeek.com site to display information on which posts are free and which a only for paid premium users. This information displays if the user is not logged in OR if they registered and are logged in but did not yet complete payment. Continue Reading →

Email Admin When a User Updates Registration Data

Chad Butler · Apr 26, 2013 ·

Here’s a request I get from time to time – how can the admin receive email notification that a user updated their data, so I figured it is about time to put that together as a tutorial.

This one should be fairly straight forward and can be used cut-and-paste for the general features. As usual, I’ve tried to comment the code so that you know what is happening where and more advanced users can build on this concept from there. Continue Reading →

Validate a registration with a PIN

Chad Butler · Apr 16, 2013 ·

Here is a script idea you can use to validate a stored value that you might have for users (such as a PIN) against their registration data. This example will assume that you only want to allow certain registrations for people who you already have data on (in this example, their name) and you want to validate that the user registering is that person. This example will use PIN assigned to the user’s data that we have and the script will validate the PIN provided at registration or will halt registration. Continue Reading →

Remove an unparsed wpmem_txt shortcode

Chad Butler · Apr 11, 2013 ·

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The wpmem_txt shortcode is something that WP-Members puts in on the fly and its purpose is to prevent WordPress from putting line breaks (<p> and <br /> via the wpautop and wptexturize functions) into the form, thus throwing off the layout. This is one of those magic things that runs in the background that no one really knows about unless something breaks it.

Here is the problem: WordPress runs the shortcode parser on the content only once. By itself, that’s not a problem. However, if a plugin or theme developer includes a shortcode in their code and they do not use the function do_shortcode() on the $content variable before returning it, any shortcodes that are executed after theirs will be unparsed. For WP-Members, a bad practice like that will result in leaving wpmem_txt unparsed in your form.

So… how do you fix this? Continue Reading →

Simple registration invite code example

Chad Butler · Apr 7, 2013 ·

This article pre-dates the Invite Codes plugin extension. I am leaving it up because it is a nice, light-weight method of setting up a simple invite code process. However, if you just want something easy, check out the Invite Codes extension.

This is an example of adding a very simple invitation code to your registration process. In this example, we will add an invitation code field to the form and set up a function to validate that code. To keep it simple, the invitation code will be static (there will be only one code). Later I will be publishing a more advanced example where you can read user specific codes from a database table, validate, and also mark the code as claimed. Continue Reading →