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Customizing Gravity Forms User Registration Activation Page

Last updated | Written by 279 Comments

  • January 7, 2020: Fixed noticed generated by use of create_function().

  • October 18th, 2013: Updated custom_maybe_activate_user() function to not rely on rgget() function.

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This article (and associated code) has been updated for Gravity Forms User Registration 3.0. If you have previously implemented this functionality and have upgraded to GFUR 3.0, please update your code with the latest versions below.
Want to customize User Activation emails? We’ve got you covered..

If you’ve checked out the latest beta for the Gravity Forms User Registration add-on, you might have noticed one of the awesome new features is “Pending Activations”. Here’s how they work.

When the user signs up, instead of automatically being registered as a user on your WordPress site, an activation email is sent to the email address they signed up with. The activation email contains an activation link. When the user clicks this link and visits the activation page, they are “activated” and their user account is registered.

One of the first things you’re probably going to want to do with this new feature is customize the activation page. This is the page where users land after clicking the activation link in the activation email. This walk-through aims to demonstrate how this activation page can be completely customized.

This process can be broken down into two simple steps:

  1. Create a custom activate.php template
  2. Override default activate.php template

1. Create a Custom activate.php Template

At the most basic level, all you need to do here is find the activate.php file in the GF User Registration plugin folder and place a copy of this file in your theme folder.

  • Path to GF User Registration activate.php file
    <root>/wp-content/plugins/gravityformsuserregistration/includes/activate.php
  • Sample path to your theme folder
    <root>/wp-content/themes/<your_theme>/

The issue with this is that the activate.php template really isn’t easy to customize. There are a lot of nested conditionals and special variables that you probably won’t understand without really digging in.

GW Activate Template

To alleviate some of this burden, I’ve created a special version of the activate.php which you can download and include in your theme which is much simpler to customize. The primary benefit is that it takes 99% of the HTML output that lives in the activate.php template and moves it out to easy-to-edit template parts.

GW Activate Template on GitHub

Just click the “zip” button to download all the template files. Once downloaded, unzip the gfur-activate-template-master.zip file. Inside you will find a gfur-activate-template-master folder. Rename this to “gfur-activate-template” and move this folder into your theme folder.

github-download-zipDownload GW Activate Template Files

The Different Views of Activation

There are several different “views” or “parts” of the activation page.

activate-success
Success
This is the default view that a user will see after clicking the activation link in the activation email. This view is handled by the activate-success.php template part.
activate-error-already-active
Error: Already Active
Occurs when a user attempts to activate an activation key which has already been activated. This view is handled by the activate-error.php template part.
activate-error
Error
If anything goes wrong during the activation (i.e. bad activation key, username already registered, etc), this view will handling displaying the error. This view is handled by the activate-error.php template part.
activate-no-key
No Key
It’s quite unlikely that users will see this view since the activation key is passed in the activation link; however, for the sake of completeness, this view is what the user will see if no activation key is passed in the activation link. This view is handled in the activate-no-key.php template part.

2. Overriding the Default Activation Template

With the template files in place, you’re ready to override the default activate template files to point to your custom files. Doing this is actually pretty simple. Just add this code to your theme’s functions.php file:

Download Code
<?php
/**
* Gravity Forms Custom Activation Template
* http://gravitywiz.com/customizing-gravity-forms-user-registration-activation-page
*/
add_action('wp', 'custom_maybe_activate_user', 9);
function custom_maybe_activate_user() {
$template_path = STYLESHEETPATH . '/gfur-activate-template/activate.php';
$is_activate_page = isset( $_GET['page'] ) && $_GET['page'] == 'gf_activation';
if( ! file_exists( $template_path ) || ! $is_activate_page )
return;
require_once( $template_path );
exit();
}
view raw gw-custom-activation-template.php.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

In plain speak, this code says: “Here is a path to the template file I’d like to use for my activation page. If this file exists and we’re on the GF User Registration activation page, go ahead and load my custom activation page file.”

If you’re using the GW Activate Template files and followed the instructions above, you won’t need to change this snippet at all. It’ll just work. Otherwise, you will need to change the $template_path variable to point to the location of your own custom activate.php file.

Is it possible to customize the activation email sent to the user?

Yup! We’ve written a tutorial with step-by-step instructions on how you can customize the user activation email. Check it out.

Anything else?

That’s it for now. Give it a go and let me know how it works out of you. I’m eager for any feedback you have!

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Comments

  1. Greg says

    HI,

    I have error with php 7.2 :

    Deprecated: Function create_function() is deprecated in /www/test.com/wp-content/themes/test/gfur-activate-template/activate.php on line 40

    here is this line of code:

    function hooks() {

    add_action('body_class', create_function('$classes', '$classes[] = "gfur-activate"; return $classes;'));

}

    Any chance for fix ?

    Reply

  2. andys says

    I tried the code but I get an error “There has been a critical error on your website.” whenever I save the code to the end of the functions.php file.

    Any Ideas?

    Reply

  3. Justin Staples says

    Hi! I am assuming the code above no longer works? And we should just be encouraged to purchase the plugin? That is what I am gathering from this since everyone including myself is not getting the above steps to work for the activation page. This is really ugly: https://prnt.sc/pmu2z7

    Any other suggestions?

    Reply

    • David Smith says

      Hi Justin, this template simply provides a way for you to customize the activation page. If your theme doesn’t load its required styles and markup via the wp_head and wp_footer actions, the results won’t be very attractive. The good news is that this template is completely customizable so you can modify it to make it as attractive as you want.

      But, yes, the plugin is a great alternative if you want something that “just works” and requires no coding.

  4. Ryan says

    Hi

    I followed the instructions for gfur-activate-template and then edited both the activate-error.php and activate-success.php file but it doesn’t seem to ue the changes I’ve made – instead it seems to ignore the edits I’ve done to those two files and displays the default message.

    Can you advise please?

    Reply

    • David Smith says

      Hi Ryan, if you change any template are you seeing your changes? If not, the template is probably not being included correctly. That’s a good place to start debugging.

    • Ryan says

      Hi David

      Yeah, I downloaded the files from Github, dropped the extracted files into the correct place and renamed the folder as described above and activated it.

      The plugin is working, as its changed the pages from the default one, so thats good.

      But when I modify the template files it doesn’t work :(

      Is there anything I else I needed to configure after downloading and activating?

    • Ryan says

      Cheers. Will give those a try. TBH you guys are the mutts nutts when it comes to handy gravity form additions – happy to join for the value you provide straight up.

      Will have a look at it again and let you know :)

  5. Ryan GWz says

    How is the password stored in order to be output in plain text on the activation page?

    This seems like a major security flaw. I would never trust I site that displays a password in plain text in any format.

    Reply

  6. Cassie says

    Thanks for this! The one weird thing I can’t seem to resolve is this: the actiation page behaves as if it’s the wordpress front page. So my site has a chunk of code in the header to display a banner with different content if is_front_page() evaluates to true. It also grabs some custom fields from the current page. What’s happening is that on the activation page, is_front_page() is true and the get_field() calls return content applied to my site’s static front page. I’d ideally like it to not do this, is there any obvious solution?

    Reply

  7. Dan says

    Thanks for this Tutorial, but I’m wondering how this Activation page is generated or what theme template is being used. Is it the page.php or index.php or something else?

    I’ve created a Default Page using Elementor Pro’s Theme Builder which applies to the Entire Site but this Activation page is NOT injected into that template. It reverts to the base theme template file.

    Any ideas on how to integrate better with Theme templates?

    Reply

    • David Smith says

      Hi Dan, this snippet loads activate.php which handles loading the theme header and footer.

      The plugin version of this will allow you to use a page though I’m not sure how well it would integrate with a page builder (if that’s what Elementor Pro provides).

  10. Geoff says

    I’ve been playing with this just now, and downloaded the source code for the files from the git page, was ready to pull my hair out with it not working, going through the PHP, decided to echo out each variable, everything was looking right, and as expected – what wasn’t right was when downloading the files from git, it adds -master to the end of the folder name. Looking over comments others have had when they’ve not had this working, it maybe an issue they’re facing also.

    Reply

    • David Smith says

      Hi Geoff, renaming the unzipped folder covered in the tutorial but I’m confident your comment will be useful to other folks who miss that step as well. ?

  11. Mike says

    I’m not seeing this work for me.

    I uploaded the directory to my theme and added the code to the functions.php file, but it’s still loading the default activate messaging text.

    I ran through the snippet troubleshooting, but it appears I’ve done everything properly. Any pointers on what to look for?

    Reply

  12. Justin says

    Hi,

    I have a private site (users already logged in with no wp-admin access) where I have Gravity From user registration set up so they can register students using a form.

    I set up a notification where is sends the {activation_url} to their personal email to activate the new user. The problem is that activation urls only work for users that are logged out of the site.

    How can I get {activation_url} to work while a user is logged in?

    Reply

    • David Smith says

      Hi Justin, I’m not aware of a such a limitation with the activation URL; however, this is a question best directed to Gravity Forms support who actually provide this merge tag. :)

  13. Shannnon says

    Thanks so much for the code! It works great. The only problem I’m having is when the activation page loads, it is not including my child theme css file. I can’t seem to fiqure out how to fix this. Do you have any suggestions?

    Reply

    • David Smith says

      Most themes will automatically work with this but in cases where your theme does not, you can manually include your theme’s CSS manually in the activate.php template() method.

  14. Craig says

    I couldnt’ get it to work… I tried everything.. I used your custom template. I tried… adding the the gfur-activate-template folder to my theme “applay/” to my theme root “themes/” I added your code snippet to my “applay/functions.php” file and nothing worked…

    Reply

  15. marcruger says

    Hello there

    after following all the steps and moving the template folder to my theme folder and paste the code into my function.php, I’m getting this error ” is currently unable to handle this request. HTTP ERROR 500″. Any idea? When I remove the snippet code then my site came back. I have a plugin installed name LearnDash and Uncanny Owl. I don’t know if this might cause the conflict but I deactivated the uncanny own. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance.

    Reply

  16. Kristof Gheyssens says

    Thx for the snippet! However, and this is probably due to Avada, although they disagree, the get_header and get_footer in de activate.php load the code ok, except for the Avada dynamic css and some Avada JS in the footer. Anyone else with Avada experiencing this problem?

    Reply

  17. Andrew Beaumont says

    A better solution would be to use WordPress’s template_include filter. This way you avoid exiting prematurely, which could matter for some themes and plugins.

    Reply

    • Kristof Gheyssens says

      @Andrew Beaumont : this completely fixed my Avada issue! YOU ROCK!! It now loads the css/js which which were not loaded with the default STYLESHEETPATH . ‘/gfur-activate-template/activate.php’;

    • Richard says

      Having same issue with Avada. Not sure where Andrew’s solution should be placed. Does anyone have this functioning correctly?

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