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.
Stop! There's a better way.
This snippet is available as a plugin with Gravity Perks, a suite of over 32 premium Gravity Forms plugins!
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
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.
Download GW Activate Template FilesThe Different Views of Activation
There are several different “views” or “parts” of the activation page.
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SuccessThis 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. |
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Error: Already ActiveOccurs 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. |
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ErrorIf 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. |
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No KeyIt’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:
| <?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(); | |
| } |
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!
Did this resource help you do something awesome with Gravity Forms? Then you'll absolutely love Gravity Perks; a suite of 31+ essential add-ons for Gravity Forms with support you can count on.
It seems to work, but all styles are missing. Did I do something wrong?
Hi Mike,
Do you already have the snippet inserted inside your theme’s function.php file? Please note that template files are supposed to use the theme’s styles and it’s just a starting point for you in case you want to do advanced customization.
In case the issue you’re experiencing is with the Theme’s styles not displaying at all, then we’ll have to take a closer look to determine what may be wrong. If you have a Gravity Perks License, you can send us a message via our support form so we can dig into this.
Best,
Hi, thanks for all the assistance. I have another question. Some people receive an error message when they want to activate their account: “activation was not successful due to following error: invalid activation key”
Can I activate it manually? Or what should they do to correct that error and activate their account?
Hi Paul,
There have been known issues where using BuddyPress conflicts with Better User Activation which generates a similar error. In case you have BuddyPress, unset the “Activation” page in BuddyPress Settings. Also, you can manually activate a user account within the Form entry page.
Best,
Hi, Is it possible that users do not have to activate their account with the link? Is there an option for them to directly use their account once they have uploaded their username and password?
Hi Paul,
Sure. Don’t enable user activation in the User Registration feed, and then use Auto Login to automatically log them in after registering.
FYI: The latest update of the User Registration Add-on uses a new activation link – domain.ext/?gfur_activation=XXX – as explained in the change log: “Updated the activation page query string to use the “gfur_activation” parameter instead of “page” to fix an issue with WordPress 5.5 where a 404 not found error occurs. Existing activation links will automatically redirect to the new page.”
As a result, the code above no longer works, altdough it’s rather straightforward how to change it to work with the new queryvar.
Hello Joachim, Thank you for bringing this up. I will forward this to my team and we will update this with the necessary steps moving forward. Have a wonderful day.
Hello – this is a great tutorial – thank you!
I am having an issue whereby the new template (wheter extended or simple) does not use the theme css of the rest of the site. That is, the header and footer and body have no styling.
Any tips on why that may be happening?
This is my site:
https://course.sustainabilityteachers.org/
Hello Carla, This is a bit of a strange one. I have attempted to test your page but cannot recreate this issue as I see the same header, footer, and body with the correct CSS. You will notice that I have gone through the registration process as well. Is their something specific I should be doing to recreate this issue or is it possibly a cache issue? Let us know.😃