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Customizing Gravity Forms User Registration Activation Page

Last updated | Written by 312 Comments

  • October 17, 2020: Added support for Gravity Forms User Registration 4.6.

  • September 30, 2020: Migrated snippet to the Snippet Library.

  • 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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Stop! There's a better way.

This snippet is available as a plugin with Gravity Perks, a suite of over 40 premium Gravity Forms plugins!

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
    /wp-content/plugins/gravityformsuserregistration/includes/activate.php
  • Sample path to your theme folder
    /wp-content/themes//

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:

/**
* 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';
	$is_activate_page = $is_activate_page || isset( $_GET['gfur_activation'] ); // WP 5.5 Compatibility

	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 39+ essential add-ons for Gravity Forms with support you can count on.

Comments

  1. Omri says

    Hello,

    The activate.php in ‘/wp-content/plugins/gravityformsuserregistration/includes/activate.php’ seems to be utilized instead of the views in the theme folder ‘gfur-activate-template’ (activate-success.php, activate-no-key.php and activate-error.php), these files make no difference when edited.

    Can you please check it? Thank you in advance.

    Reply

    • Samuel Bassah says

      Hi Omri,

      I just tried it and it works as expected. Can you confirm if you’ve added the PHP code to override the default activation template? Also, check to see if the gfur-activate-template folder name is correct. However, if it’s still not working for you, you can get in touch with us via our support form if you have an active Gravity Forms license so we can dig into this further.

      Best,

    • Samuel Bassah says

      Hi Erika,

      In other to be sure what’s happening, we’ll have to take a look at your setup. If you’re a Gravity Perks subscriber, you can get in touch with us via our support form so we can dig into this further.

      That said, we have a better way of customizing the activation page using our GP Better User Activation Perk, so you may also want to check that out. Once activated you can use the [gpbua] merge tag to insert the user activation content anywhere in your page layout.

      Best,

  3. Ruben says

    Im disappointed, nothing work. I add the code in functions child and main theme, add the folder, changed the name, modify the path. Nothing work for me. Does someone can tell me that it works in 2021?

    Reply

  4. Hossein Mohammadi says

    Hello

    How can I hide the register form for logged users ? I make form by your addon.

    Regards Hossein Mohammadi

    Reply

    • Samuel Bassah says

      Hi Hossein,

      We have a snippet you can use to skip user registration for logged in users. Another solution will be to use a role based plugin to hide the page with the register form from Logged in users.

      Best,

    • Ryan Donovan says

      Hello RB, Thank you for that information. When you apply this to your site and run it live, do you get this error? Let us know. 😃

  6. henry says

    Why not combine this plugin with GF Better User Activation so that users can use Elementor or WPBakery with the addon?

    Reply

    • Ryan Donovan says

      Hey Henry, this is a great question. We currently are just addons for Gravity Forms so we could not combine the two to make one. The Perk we have within Gravity Wiz is created to solve that issue. As Scott previously mentioned Visual page builders are supported in GF Better User Activation using the [gpbua] shortcode. Is there something that you are looking for that is not resolved within these solutions? Let us know and we would be happy to help!

  7. Henry says

    Great thanks for this. I installed and seems to work. But I am using Elementor for all my page themes. How can I put what you did into my normal Elementor page template?

    Reply

  8. Peter Netz Lassen says

    Hi Maybe this is more a fuature request?

    I HAVE to manually activate a new user. So I would ask if this auto activation could look “human” maybe with more than one “Office hour” random minutes activation delay?

    Hope that can be done?

    Peter

    Reply

    • Samuel Bassah says

      Hi Peter,

      I’m not sure I understand your request very well, but you could send Users an activation link to activate their account. Also, Gravity Forms User Registration Add-on is what actually handles the user activations, so you may want to contact Gravity Forms Support with the Feature Request.

      Best,

    • Samuel Bassah says

      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,

  10. PAUL CABALLERO says

    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?

    Reply

    • Samuel Bassah says

      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,

  11. paul says

    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?

    Reply

    • Scott Buchmann says

      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.

  12. Joachim says

    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.

    Reply

    • Ryan Donovan says

      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.

    • Ryan Donovan says

      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.😃

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