WP-Members 2.7 Project List

This is the WP-Members 2.7 project list.  At this point, everything is pretty well complete and the release candidate is in the testing phase.    

Completed:

• Added customized email message functions – allows site admins to set the content of all emails sent by the plugin – will include a list of shortcodes for inserting relevant data into the email content.
• Added dropdown support in the field management panel.
• Changed the timing of pluggable.php file load so that constants can be used without options needting to be loaded twice.
• Registration now stores the url the user registered on for all registrations, not just if registration is moderated.
• Trim trailing whitespace on members area, register, and custom css urls.
• Added wp_specialchars_decode to blogname in emails.
• Made registration function pluggable.
• Updated sidebar widget – now multi-widget compatible.
• Option for users setting their own passwords at registration.*
• Make Terms of Service a WP page. **

There are two elements in this list that are new features that may be subject to changing the way they are done in future versions:

*User defined passwords at registration

The plugin as it was originally designed was developed to use an email confirmation model. This is done by requiring the user to receive a random password via email.  The user registers, then receives a random password via email, then they can sign in and change the password to whatever they want.  This forces the user to register with, at minimum, a valid email address.

Some users of the plugin desire their users to be able to set their own password at registration.  Implementing this change into the plugin, while simple in concept, is not as simple in reality because it changes several elements of the registration script flow.

In version 2.7, I have overcome some of those challenges and was able to not need to add this into the plugin options.  Admins can now add a password field via the field management panel and it will provide a password field in the registration form.

The caveat to this process comes into registration moderation.  The flow for moderated registration was to prevent user access until approved by setting a random password for the account, then when the user is activated, emailing a new random password to the user. This is because the login process for the plugin hooks into the WordPress login process, which does not shut out users based on activation.

So for now, a password field may be included in the registration form, but you will not be able to use this in conjunction with the moderated registration feature.  (I’ll be working to integrate that in the future by making some changes to the login functions.)

**Make Terms of Service a WP page

When I added a Terms of Service (TOS) checkbox to the default plugin install, I added it as an editable dialog.  This was so that a simple html page could be generated as a popup that would contain the TOS content (defined by the site admin).  Some plugin users had requested that this be able to link to a WP page where they have their TOS content established (presumably for use in other areas of the site as well).

I added that capability to this release.  But in order to do this in a way that is simple for programming the plugin may not turn out to be the best for script efficiency.  So we will see how the process as I created it works out and leave it open to being subject to change in future versions.

What that mean in plain English is this:  If you utilize this feature, you will need to be aware that the process may need to be changed in a future version which will result in you needing to make some changes on your end to keep the flow from breaking.

I try to make upgrades as seamless as possible so that you can upgrade without needing to make any changes (as most people don’t actually read the upgrade notices, and most people upgrade on a production system without testing).  And some of the ways that I thought this might evolve may be able to be done without the user needing to change anything, but I still want to put this out there that it might work out that way, so just be aware.

For now, to keep it as simple as possible, if you have a WordPress page set with your Terms of Service, you can just set a shortcode with that location in the TOS dialog box in the plugin admin panel.  Then the TOS link in the form will open that page in a new window rather than the built-in popup.