Easily add a front-end log in, log out, and password reset experience to your membership site by following the steps covered in this post. We’ll outline our recommended third party plugin for front-end login, as well as some “best practice” guidelines for placing these links on your site using your theme or Memberlite.
Topics include: Recommended Plugin | Configuring TML | Link Placement Best Practices | Styling the Login Page | A Conditional Login/Logout Link
Wait, doesn’t Paid Memberships Pro do this?
Our plugin allows the member account to be created in one step as part of checkout. But, returning members need to be able to easily access your login and password reset pages.
PMPro does not alter the main WordPress login functionality, so users will see the same WordPress-themed “Log In” page that you are probably familiar with. Use our recommendation below to add frontend login.
Note: Some themes include pages for a front-end log in experience. If this is the case, we recommend keeping that experience in place as it may be more trouble to unravel and put another method in place.
We recommend Theme My Login
Theme My Login by Jeff Farthing creates a themed (frontend) login, password recovery, and user profile section. In addition, we recommend the plugin for login redirection settings and blocked “admin” access.
Download Theme My Login via the WordPress.org Plugin Repository
…or search for “Theme My Login” from the Plugins > Add New page in the WordPress admin.
Configuring Theme My Login
When you activate TML, the plugin will generate five pages: Login, Log Out, Lost Password, Reset Password, and Register. All of these pages except the “Register” page will be used in your membership site (we redirect all User Registration to the Membership Levels page for level selection and, hopefully, membership checkout).
There are no additional steps required at this point to make TML functional. You can certainly edit the generated pages to add additional styles, widgets, wording, etc. Just be sure you do not remove the [theme-my-login] shortcode from the page content.
Where to add your “Log In” links
Today’s web user has certain expectations about your site’s “Log In” links. Here are some best practices to consider:
- The link is expected to be placed in the upper right corner of the page.
- Consider placing a “Sign Up” (Join or Register) link in this same space as well.
- The link should be present across all pages on your site.
- Swap to a “Log Out” link once the member has logged in.
- The “Log Out” link is often accompanied by a reminder of the logged in member’s display name that links to their membership account details or profile.
- If your site is responsive, make sure that your “Log In” links are present in the smaller device views, either at the very top of the screen or in your mobile/responsive menu.
Memberlite does all of the above by default, excluding the “Mobile” view of your log in link. If you’re running Memberlite, I recommend using the TML plugin and adding the “Theme My Login” widget to the “Mobile Menu” widget area. The screenshot to the right shows how I have it configured for the Paid Memberships Pro website.
If your theme does not have a widget, menu area, or hook in place to add a log in feature in the upper right, open a topic on our members forum and we will help you find the best way to add this to your site.
We also include a “Log In” link in the default message that a visitor sees when trying to access members only content. Confirm that you have not removed this link by visiting the Memberships > Advanced Settings page in the WordPress admin.
Styling the Log In Page
TML is very lightly styled – the shortcode output on your generated Login and Password Reset pages will inherit your theme styling.
If you’re running Memberlite , here’s a little code to enhance the appearance of your Login/Lost Password/Reset Password pages. Set the “Page Template” to “Full Width” and replace the page content with the following:
[row] [col medium="4" medium_offset="4"] <div class="pmpro_message pmpro_default">[theme-my-login]</div> [/col] [/row] |
I also checked the boxes to “Hide Page Title” and “Hide Breadcrumbs” in the Memberlite Settings box, then set the “Banner Description” to the following:
<h1 class="text-center">Log In</h1> |
The Conditional “Log In” link
After activating TML, navigate to the Appearance > Menus area of your admin. Under the “Pages” section in the left column, you’ll see pages titled “Log In” and “Log Out”. Add these two pages to your menu. TML has background logic in place to only show the appropriate menu link based on the user.
Take this one step further and use the Nav Menus Add On for Paid Memberships Pro. This will allow you to use the same theme location to show a different menu of links based on the visitor/user/member status. We use TML in combination with the Nav Menus Add On on this site to link to our member support forums for PMPro Plus or PMPro Unlimited members using the “Member Menu” theme location of Memberlite.
Do More with Theme My Login
Theme My Login also has advanced logic for blocking the WordPress backend by “role”, as well as redirection on login based on “role”. You can read more about all the features of TML on their WordPress.org plugin repository listing.
If you’re looking to redirect members on login based on membership level, see this blog post on membership level redirection.
Why doesn’t Paid Memberships Pro do X? I’ll sum up; because someone else has already done it:)
This is a really tricky area though, on one hand you have developers – who want the lightest possible plugin – just handling what it’s designed to do and not messing with things it shouldn’t, and on the other hand you have end users, who are looking for a complete ‘out of the box’ plugin experience.
I’ve wrestled with some enormous membership plugins over the years on behalf of my clients – many people start off with an ‘out of the box’ solution, only later discovering limitations when they want to change/improve things. So you’re definitely right with recommending plugins for adding functionality. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for sharing.
Great article. The early advice to use TML when I set up my client site using PMPro was an eye-opener. Some of their add-ons add incredible functionality, especially the ability to redirect certain members to parts of the site based on their membership level or role. I love the idea about putting the login screen in the area of the ‘not logged in’ message, but I’m wondering how to control the redirection in that instance so it doesn’t go back to a preset dashboard page or something when logging in. (I guess I’ll have to dig in and see if the shortcode allows for an attribute.)
One thing I’d like to note about TML, that I’ve noticed with my site, and we’re working to implement our own login/out/reset pages to resolve – TML adds about 800ms of time to our Time to First Byte. Just something I recommend checking when you’re testing out this plugin!
Thanks for the info on that. That is quite a bit of time for a plugin like TML. Feel free to follow up with Justin (TML Author) about that. Let me know if you find any info on why that might be. And I’ll run a few tests to see if I can figure out why that’s happening.
Hello , thanks for your article. I have just followed the steps, but can’t see where a password is generated…? It asks users to reset their password, but it is not generated in the first place. Do I need an ad-on? a pro account?
I’m not sure I understand your question, but I think you’re asking how the new password is generated when users reset their password. The process is something like this:
1. Users click on the “reset password” link.
2. Users enter their username or email address.
3. An email is sent to the users from WordPress with a link to reset their password
4. When the user clicks on that link, they are taken to a form to enter and confirm the new password.
Hope this helps.
Using the Free Version, Why cant Pay Pal work without clients having an acct. I called PP and they told me it was you. It was working and since your upgrade my clients now only have the ability to pay using PP not with CC’s or as Guest checkout. It states that the Free membership pro has a valid key code and when i put it in it says expired. So can you tell me. Why? I bought this with my Theme and had this working then the code went invalid and the only way to make this work is Buy the Full Membership? Dont understand.
The only theme we are officially partnered with is the Memberlite theme that we’ve built. All of our code is open source though, so some other themes may have bundled PMPro with it or directed you to download our plugin from the WP.org repository or GitHub. In any case, any license key you got from the theme won’t work with the PMPro license form, which is only required to install or update some of our addons through the WP dashboard.
RE PayPal requiring a PayPal account for subscriptions: here is where we in the code set the flag to tell PayPal that a PP account is not required:
https://github.com/strangerstudios/paid-memberships-pro/blob/dev/classes/gateways/class.pmprogateway_paypalexpress.php#L558
I’ve heard reports of this not working for certain customers in certain cases, but am not sure of exactly what might cause this to stop working. If you post a thread in our support forums, we can get more info to look into it for you.
I’ve also found this, which may be applicable:
https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/account-optional
Wow 800ms additional load time? That’s not good.
I am surprised by the lack of help documents in Theme My Login site. I don’t want to hide home page. How to display?
How to display what?
Can I use User Profiles made easy instead of TMS?
I haven’t tested “User Profiles” but I’ll put it on my list to try out – if I find any inconsistencies I’ll post to the blog. If you tried it out yourself, please let us know in a comment reply below.
I had the theme my log in page working beautifully but when I switched from PP to Stripe, somehow now I can only get a themed log in if you click on Login from the membership menu at the top menu, if you go to content and click log in it takes you to the default WP Login generic (non Theme my login page), can anyone help me trouble shoot this. Since I did not generate the login and register buttons under the content (PMPro did), I am not sure how to redirect where the Login is directing people … and I can’t figure out why it was working and now is not.
Thanks for the help
kristi
empowered advocacy
You can simply modify the links under Memberships > Advanced Settings to the appropriate login page URL (usually “/login/”. I will test this as well and see what the issue could be.
Is there a way to set up the login redirect with using this plugin TML?
TML has a redirection module, but it is all role based, not membership level. If you need to redirect based on membership level, see these guides:
https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/redirect-members-to-pages-based-on-their-level/
https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/redirect-members-to-referrer-on-login/
https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/redirect-unique-member-homepage-based-level-new-add-available/
There’s something that doesn’t seem to work after TML installation: on the themed login page there’s a register link that is not redirected to pmpro register page but goes to tml register page instead. Does this happen to me only? I’m fixing it via htaccess but it was supposed to work without tweaks, right?
Yes it should redirect without issue – what you can do is uncheck “anyone can register” from the Settings > General page in the WP Dashboard. This will remove the “Register” link from the TML pages but still allow registration via membership checkout.
Thank you for your useful suggestion !
Sorry for the long post.
I’ve taken over a site that was setup by someone else and after migrating the site to a new location we have login issues. The previous developer (now deceased) used the TML shortcode ‘[theme-my-login]‘ on each of the TML pages. That is all that is on those pages. But he didn’t have the TML plugin installed!
He used Dynamic Widgets Plugin and has setup Tabbed Login Widget. The homepage shows the login tabs in the sidebar and when people enter their username and password it used to take them to the membership section and the daily digest of news page. Now it takes them to the WordPress login screen. I setup pmpro-redirect and activated it, but it isn’t taking people to the right page. It was taking them to their profile. I setup a redirect (with another plugin) that sends them to the daily digest page instead of the profile, but they have to login twice.
Any help would be appreciated.
I may have missed some other questions in there, but this “they have to login twice” is often caused when http and https versions of a site are both linked to on the site. If a user has logged into the http version of the site, then end up on an https page, they might have to login again. There is some info on fixing that here: https://www.paidmembershipspro.com/configuring-wordpress-always-use-httpsssl/
Another common cause for that is a multisite setup where there are separate domains or subdomains.
We would need some further information from you and likely access to your site to look around. If you post to our member forums, we can help you there.
Hi PMPro – TML version 7 (updated 12/6/18) has now moved to only offering commercial extensions to carry out some of the important functions in their ‘modules’ (e.g. for user’s editing their profile page) – will PMPro be able to do this instead in the future? This will cause some problems for many users who relied on TML to get PMPro working on their site (including us). Does PMPro still recommend TML now as a premium plugin?
Hi @parishpump,
We noticed this coming change a little while ago too and are working on short term and long term solutions for our users. We’ve heavily encouraged users to use TML and it’s an issue that users need to pay to get the same functionality from the new TML that they used to get for free.
In the short term, here are a couple options:
1. Remain in version 6.4 of TML. You can edit the plugin header to change the version to 9999 or something like that so it doesn’t prompt you for an update any more. The last version of TML is likely to work for a while until a WP update changes something about the login system that breaks it.
2. Pay them $50 (use the discount code SAVEFACE for a 20% discount) for the bundle or $10 for the themed profiles module. I am not sure yet if simply upgrading to the version 7 and paying will keep things working as they were on the old version if you’ll have to set things up again… specifically those custom templates may be an issue. You should be able to ask the TML team about that.
Long term we are looking into providing some of the functionality that TML did in a PMPro addon (or maybe in our core plugin). The themed profiles stuff in particular is pretty complicated to write and maintain, but is a focus of ours. It is going to take some time.
Stay tuned to our blog. We might post an update there as we gather more information on this and potential alternatives to TML… but we haven’t seen any that we like as much yet.
I hope this helps.
[…] Paid Memberships Pro has some best practices for your member login pages. […]
[…] your site’s “Log In” links. This post covers a few methods to add these links to the expected location on your website. Use one of the options below to add a conditional “log in” link to a Menu in the […]
[…] This plugin handles redirection extremely well, which is why we didn’t include the functionality in Paid Memberships Pro itself. Theme My Login includes a setting to redirect users on login, as well as block dashboard access based on role. We have a longer post detailing the setup and additional features of this plugin here. […]