Customize Your Community Plugin

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The Customize Your Community (CYC) Wordpress Plugin will help you theme your “backend” Wordpress pages that are visible to registered users to a level that previous “themed login” type plugins haven’t allowed for previously.

This plugin was conceived by Sugarrae and coded by Joost de Valk, otherwise known as the Wordpress plugin master and czar of THE Wordpress mailing list anyone serious about Wordpress is subscribed to.

With CYC, the registration, login, logout, lost password pages and the profile.php page (please do NOT register at my blog to test this, screen shot of a customized profile.php page follows) will use your existing blog theme and will not show obvious traces and branding of Wordpress on these pages to users labeled as subscribers. Additionally, the ability to add a captcha to the registration page to prevent automated registrations is now an available option.

The CYC plugin will also automatically redirect users labeled “subscribers” to their profile.php page - removing their ability to see the Wordpress Dashboard without requiring additional plugins.

Installation

Download the plugin zip File
Unzip the plugin file
Upload the /cyc/ folder file to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder
Activate the plugin from your plugins administration screen
Customize the settings (more on this below) under Settings > CYC

Customization aka CYC Admin Panel

To customize the CYC plugin to work with your template, you’ll need to visit the administration panel at Settings > CYC. Once there, you’ll see three boxes you can insert code into:

Box One: Code to insert after the header has been loaded
Box Two: Code to insert before the sidebar is loaded
Box Three: Code to insert after the sidebar has been loaded

Those familiar with Wordpress and CSS will likely have no problem figuring out what goes there. For those who are more “blogger” than “coder”, I’m going to explain how to find what to put in those boxes below:

Look at your single post template file in your blog theme (usually single.php) and find every div tag that is opened (<div>) but not closed (</div>) before the following piece of code:

<?php the_content(); ?>

After finding them, insert all of those div tags into Box One.

Next, look for the piece of code that calls for your sidebars. I use the Thesis theme, so mine is:

<?php thesis_get_sidebars(); ?>

But yours may look more like this:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

Once you find the sidebar code, look to see how many of the <div> tags you put into Box One are closed BEFORE the sidebar code appears and insert those div close tags (</div>) into Box Two.

Next, look to see how many of the <div> tags you put into Box One are closed AFTER the sidebar code appears and insert those div close tags (</div>) into Box Three.

Click “update settings” and you should be all set.

FAQ Section

Question:“I’ve installed the CYC plugin and everything looks good on all the registration, login, etc pages, but my profile.php still looks like regular Wordpress. What am I doing wrong?”

Answer: Because administrators, editors and contributers all need to see the “backend” anyway, your profile pages will not show in the customized design. The CYC plugin will only theme the profile.php pages of users set as “subscribers”. You’ll need to create a test account on your blog and set it at the subscriber level to check and make sure everything is working properly and see the themed profile.php page.

Question:“I’m wondering if there is a way to customize it for layouts with 2 sidebars? I’ve tried everything I can think of, but haven’t been able to make it call both sidebars - or neither sidebar. Right now I get the login/register box fine, but sidebar one shows up under it all messed up.”

Answer: 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.

Question:“I’m using the Semiologic Pro theme and am having a few issues getting this plugin to display properly. Any tips?”

Answer: You might want to check out this post by Wordpress Angel where there is some more detailed information about using this plugin with the Semiologic theme.

Versions and Changelogs

09.18.08 - Version 0.5 closed beta
09.19.08 - Version 0.5 specific fix to allow plugin to work with the Thesis theme added
09.21.08 - Version 1.0 released for private preview on Yoast Mailing List
09.22.08 - Version 1.0 released for public use
09.28.08 - Version 1.1 released for public use, now with an option to place a captcha on the registration page to help prevent robots from registering
09.29.08 - Version 1.1.1 released for public use, issue with lost password screen not working is now fixed