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As some of you that follow my profile on Twitter may know, I’ve got a few Wordpress plugins and other related items in the works and today I am releasing my first ever Wordpress plugin (thanks to some help from and collaboration with the fabulous Joost).
It’s called Customize Your Community aka CYC. And, not only is this plugin kick ass, but it’s also free (though donations never hurt).
A while back, I moved this blog to allowing comments from registered users only. And because this meant users were now going to see the backend of my blog, I went around installing various plugins to limit what they could see in the dashboard as well as try and customize it as much as possible to match my site.
After a lot of searching, I finally found a plugin that themed the registration and login type pages and in combination with some other plugins, was able to limit what registered users could see in my dashboard. But I found absolutely nothing to customize the user profile page. Zip. Nada.
While I liked the fact that my login and registration pages were seamless with the rest of my site, that ugly non matching user profile page was driving me nuts. So I enlisted Joost’s programming skills to create something that will allow you to create a community on your blog that is branded you and not Wordpress (not that we don’t appreciate Wordpress).
See the CYC plugin page for full details of what this awesome plugin can do. Also, if your goal is to create “community”, I’d also recommend using the new user email setup plugin to create a personalized email for your community as well complete the effect.
Hope you guys find CYC as awesome as I do. And make sure you subscribe to the feed or the newsletter (see the right sidebar) because it won’t be long before I release my next plugin.
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This looks great! One thing though, how does it deal with bots signing up? Will you be adding some form of user authentication?
Otherwise, awesome plugin.
Awesome. I might push my lazy butt into installing this on one of my blogs.
Are we going to see a future blog post on the motivation and results for these plugins? ‘Cause we know there’s just got to be more going on that just ‘free plugins’ :).
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What? A girl can’t give away a few free plugins? Huh? ;-)
Nice plugin. It is pretty seamless, isn’t it?
Hi there,
I have installed the plugin and got it to work, but I am having a problem displaying the two sidebars in the correct position. I have followed your instructions to the letter - closed all open divs and added the inc sidebar command to the plugin file. Everything is on the page, but the sidebars are below the log in form. It must be something to do with the divs, I have tried adding none and adding more than suggested, but nothing works. Any ideas?
Looks like a great plugin if I can get the page to display properly.
Hi Rae,
Re My earlier comment - I have fixed the problem. You know how it helps to walk away for a while, have a cup of tea, do something else then come back and look at a problem afresh? Well, I did this and the solution turned out to be very simple! I added another DIV tag in the middle box and the problem was resolved. Ain’t that always the way!
Gonna have a play with the plugin now.
Thanks.
Hi there,
wonderful piece of work, thank you! But the plugin is not partially working for me at all. The login form is skinned, but Register and Lost Password links are not formatted, they are displayed as big Times ( default browser) font. Also all the user’s profile items are in Times. Thanks for any help.
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It sounds like you’re missing a div tag - be sure to read the instructions under customization to help you find which div tag you’re overlooking. Cheers.
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Fatal error: Call to a member function has_cap() on a non-object in html/wp-content/plugins/exec-php/includes/user_ui.php on line 40
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@Roscoe we just released version 1.1 of CYC today, which includes the ability to add a captcha to the registration page to help prevent automated signups. You’ll need to upgrade your plugin (it should give you the message automatically if you already have it installed - if not, you can get the new version here) and then visit the CYC admin panel and check off the box relating to the captcha.
may be I am completely fool, but my single.php contains only 2 div marks before the_content: content, entry. Both are closed before sidebar is loaded:
<h1 id="post-"><a href="" rel="bookmark">
Posted: by
Categories:
Comments: <a href=”">
Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.
I have followed your customization manual, but still is login form partially formatted and user profile completely without formatting:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3057/2897568431_8bed513bcb_o.png
sorry, one more try:
source code of single.php
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3117/2897571923_a9440f8710_o.png
Thanks a lot for your work! I installed cyc and it works great - except the “Retrieve lost password” - function. It doesnt send out any emails, when i enter my adress or username and press “Get new password” - the site just reloads but i get no confirmation and no email is sent.
When i deactivate cyc everything works fine. I use Wordpress 2.62 - would be great if you could help me. Thanks!
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@stingray thanks for the note… we’ve fixed the issue… you’ll need to upgrade the plugin to CYC version 1.1.1 - cheers!
great, thanks!
i just wanted to download 1.1.1 but i noticed that its still 1.1 - please put up the current version with the bugfix. Thanks a lot
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Sorry stingray, my bad - Joost had uploaded the new 1.1.1 version to the CYC wordpress page, but I forgot to update the actual plugin page. Both now contain 1.1.1 :) Thanks for letting me know :)
Hi Rae,
i found another bug - if you enter two different words into the “new password” fields on the profile-page, you get redirected to an error page in the wordpress backend with the old layout. I tested it with CYC 1.1.1. Would be great if you could fix it.
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Wow…this couldn’t have been easier, even for a code plebe such as myself! See, I told you I’d do it today. ;) As impressed with this plugin as I was with “Social Profiles”. :)
Job well done, Rae & Joost! Looking forward to future plugins.
Hello,
I am really excited about this plugin however I’m having a hard time getting my layout to work properly. I have a wordpress site with 2 sidebars.
The layout is like this: Left Sidebar | Content in the Middle | Right Sidebar
I can’t seem to get the login/registration in between the two sidebars. Both sidebars show up but the login info is on top of it. I’ve tried all I can think of.
Also my get_sidebar code it at the very top of the single.php file and there isn’t really that much code before it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Jason
Also here is a link to what my login page looks like: http://www.centraljerseybjj.com/wp-login.php
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@jasculs this issue is addressed in the FAQ here.
Thank you for your reply…I saw that answer in the FAQ and I couldn’t quite figure out how to do it. I also couldn’t find “get_sidebar()” in the CYC plugin code.
Also both of my sidebars are showing up right away, not just one of them but the content is on top of the sidebars not in the middle.
I appreciate the help.
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@jasculs the “get_sidebar()” will be in your theme code on the single.php page, not the CYC plugin code.
Ok…I’ll check it out, thanks…In the mean time the wording of the section may be a bit confusing, check it out:
“You should open up the code for the plugin and look for get_sidebar(); and add the code for your second sidebar either before or after it. It will be up to you to decide what suits you best.”
Hi rae,
i discovered another problem: The captcha doesnt work in my version (1.1.1) - it always says the code i typed in is the wrong one - do you know how to fix this issue? Thanks!
Hi Rae,
did you figure out where the bug is when you type two different words (or a mistyping) into the new-password-fields on the my-profile page? I always get redirected to the wordpress backend - the problem exists on your blogs user profiles too, just try it :)
Would be great to get this fixed because it is the only point where the user gets back into the old wordpress-backend.
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A bit late to the party, but finally got this installed on one site, and it’s looking great, except my subscriber-level profile pages are now broken.
Someone else mentioned this, but not in much detail. When you install CYC along with Exec-PHP, the subscriber profile pages conflict with the has_cap() function at /wp-content/plugins/exec-php/includes/user_ui.php on line 40, and you’re left without the submit/update button at the bottom of the form.
Any ideas/plans to fix this? Or is there something I can do to tweak it myself?
Thanks for such a great plugin- that’s just what i needed! Any chances for fixing a bug that n3po mentioned above?
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