Not that long ago, I posted a little shout out for some help dealing with spam registrations. Between my personal blog, and VoodooPress, I was getting hammered. Well Ryan Imel stopped by with a little suggestion I hadn’t even considered. 2 words: Gravity Forms. Let me break it down for you.
I had bought Gravity Forms a while back on a full developer license for a project I was working on (well, I’m slow, so it’s an ongoing thing). I didn’t really need the full on dev license at that time, but I bought it to check things out, and because it came so highly recommended. I’ve only begun to figure out all the amazing things that can be done with this plugin. But here, I’m going to tell you about one stellar feature, and how to get it going.
Spam is a royal PITA. We all have to deal with it. Akismet and Cookies for Comments are 2 plugins which rock for stopping bad comments. But I couldn’t get the registration thing sorted out. If I tried to increase the security there, I always blocked a fair amount of legitimate users. And I’m not about to use a captcha or some other test.
Ryan recommended using Gravity Forms with the user registration plugin. That’s right, a plugin with plugins. Just so I’m up front here, to use the registration plugin, you need to buy the full on dev license for gravity forms, which I think is running $199 right now. A simple Google search will always find you a coupon code to get at least 25% off. If you take the leap, you won’t regret it, it’s the last form plugin you will ever need.
Once you have the plugin, they have plenty of tutorials on their website to guide you through the nitty gritty, I’m going to just give a basic run down of what I did. If you are hammered by registration spam, it’s a solution to consider. With absolutely no other form of security, just by doing this, I dropped from 40+ spam registrations per day on each site, to 0. Absolutely none.
The first thing to do is to install Gravity Forms, and then install the User Registration add on. Next up, head into general settings and uncheck anybody can register. That will kill access to the default registration form. Don’t worry, we’ll override it with our form.
Now we create a new form in Gravity Forms. You can go crazy here if you like. This plugin will support adding in any fields you would like, but that’s another tutorial. For me, I just set it up with a text field for user name, an advance field to grab first and last name, an email field to grab the email address, and the password field. That’s another cool thing, you can let people set their passwords right from this form, bypassing the email temporary password business.
Once the form is all set up we head into the User Registration settings page of Gravity Forms (which shows up after you turn on the User Registration add on) and select add new. Then we get a dropdown where we can select the form we just created. Once we select our form, we can map the fields we added to our form to the user registration process. I found it pretty self explanatory. Username to username, password to password, email to email, etc. You also need to set the user level for new members, often subscriber. Once everything is mapped, save it.
The next thing we need to do is add the form to a page. You can do it a variety of ways, maybe making a specially formatted template, or you can even put your form into a widget. I just made a standard page and clicked the gravity forms icon to drop in my form, and saved the page. I use custom menus, so I decided not to add my form to it, instead, I made a nice box at the top of my screen for login and registration.
In header.php of my child theme I simply added this:
<body <?php body_class(); ?>>
<?php if ( function_exists( 'voodoo_register_bar' ) ) {
voodoo_register_bar();
} ?>
<div id="page" class="hfeed">Which calls out to a function in my site’s functionality plugin (would also work in functions.php – you can read the linked article to see why I went with a plugin). Here’s that setup:
function voodoo_register_bar() { ?>
<?php if( ! is_user_logged_in() ) { ?>
<div id="reg-wrap">
<?php } else { ?>
<div id="reg-wrap-in">
<?php } ?>
<div id="voodoo-reg">
<?php
$voodooredir = htmlspecialchars($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
$loginoutlink = wp_loginout($voodooredir, false);
$items .= '<span>'. $loginoutlink .'</span>';
if( ! is_user_logged_in() ) {
echo $items . ' or <span><a href="' . home_url( '/' ) . 'join-voodoopress">Join VoodooPress.</a></span>';
} else {
echo $items;
} ?>
</div>
</div>
<?php }That just uses some conditionals to account for the admin bar, and to display different options for logged in or logged out users. We display a logout link if someone is logged in, and we display login and register links to someone who isn’t logged in. The URL is simply to the page which contains my new registration form. Finally, in case you are interested, the css:
#reg-wrap {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
width: 100%;
}
#reg-wrap-in {
position: absolute;
top: 28px;
width: 100%;
}
#voodoo-reg {
float: right;
width: 300px;
margin: 0.5em 4em 0 0;
background-color: #9e9786;
background-color: rgba(158, 151, 134, 0.8);
background-image: url('http://cdn.rvoodoo.com/rvoodoo_files/voodoopress/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/login-icon.png');
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: left center;
padding: 5px 0 5px 3em;
font-size: 1.275em;
text-indent: 30px;
border: 4px double #fff;
-webkit-border-radius: 7px;
-moz-border-radius: 7px;
-o-border-radius: 7px;
border-radius: 7px;
-webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 12px rgba(64, 31, 31, 0.5);
-moz-box-shadow: 5px 5px 12px rgba(64, 31, 31, 0.5);
box-shadow: 5px 5px 12px rgba(64, 31, 31, 0.5);
color: #666;
color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6);
text-shadow: 0 1px 1px #fff;
}
#voodoo-reg span {
font-weight: bold;
color: #666;
color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.6);
text-shadow: 0 1px 1px #fff;
}Which makes my new login/register box all nice and pretty. And that is all there is to it. On my personal blog, I kept it even simpler. I don’t have a super stylin’ login/register box. Just simple text at the bottom of the page which looks like:
<p id="footer-wp"> <?php wp_loginout(); ?> · <?php if( ! is_user_logged_in () ) : ?><a href="http://www.rvoodoo.com/register/">Register</a><?php endif; ?> </p>
Which always displays the login/out link, and only presents the register link if the user is not logged in.
It’s a simple solution, especially if you are already using Gravity Forms. One I hadn’t thought about for months, and wish I’d implemented much earlier. If you don’t use Gravity Forms, I highly recommend it. I’ve only just begun learning what all I can do with this plugin. It has much power!
*Just to be upfront here, the links I have in this article do contain affiliate links. I had actually planned on writing this article prior to having an affiliate link. Once I realized I was planning to recommend Gravity Forms for a few different things over a couple of different articles, I decided to grab an affiliate ID, just in case someone wants to buy it. Gotta pay them server bills somehow eh?
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