authenticate

Understanding what happens during user login

Chad Butler · Jul 23, 2026 ·

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WP-Members’s login process incorporates a number of core WP functions, actions, and filters in order to provide as seamless an integration with other general WP plugins as possible. A lot has to happen to sign in a user, whether using WordPress alone, or along with WP-Members, so it can be confusing when things don’t seem to work correctly. This article breaks down a number of the processes that occur during this process to help you figure out where to look when things go wrong.

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Log in with Email or Username

Chad Butler · Jan 6, 2015 ·

Here is a simple method for allowing users to log in with either their username or their email address.

This process allows the user to log in using either their username or their email address. It’s not difficult to implement and leaves you with a clean process where you don’t have to worry about what to do when users change their email address.

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Workaround for WP-Members front end login when using a CAPTCHA device on the WP login form

Chad Butler · Dec 20, 2013 ·

If you using a plugin to implement a CAPTCHA on the WordPress login form (the backend login, wp-login.php), you will find that this is not always compatible with the WP-Members front end login.

WP-Members includes WP’s native hooks such as login_form for broad compatibility with plugins that may add additional authentication to the login. But these are not always compatible with WP-Members or with front-end logins in general.

If the third party plugin does not load its scripts on the front end, it will not be compatible. If you are getting failed logins with strange error messages (such as “human verification incorrect” or something like that), then the issue is likely that a third party CAPTCHA is being used, but cannot authenticate on the front end of the site.

What happens is that in order to implement the CAPTCHA, the plugin must remove the function wp_authenticate_username_password from the authenticate process with remove_filter. This allows the plugin to implement its own authentication that includes not only username and password, but also will validate the CAPTCHA.

This creates a problem since WP-Members also uses WP’s authentication to log a user in. Because the WP-Members form will only be passing two parameters, username and password, and the authentication is now requiring the addition of a third parameter (the CAPTCHA) that is not included in that form, the login will fail.

There are ways to work around this.

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