Pie Register Wordpress Plugin Setup

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Sometimes you need more than the standard Wordpress register page. What if you want to screen your users or verify them before allowing them to post. This was the case for one of my clients. Her Wordpress based site was a directory using Apptheme’s Classipress and before users submitted listings, she wanted to screen them to make sure they were good enough. We needed a way to verify users before approving their registration.

In the past, I’ve used Register Plus on Wordpress installs to force users to enter an invitation code upon registration. This is great for family or small group sites. However, Register Plus is no longer being supported and development ended in 2008. A new version of Register Plus has come into existence, Pie Register. Pie Register has all the same features and a few bugs.

Pie Register allows users to set their own password, an invitation code, visual verification code, extra registration fields and custom fields. We only needed the password, first and last name and website. This way she could check out her users and either approve or reject them. Remember, she’s only looking for the best.

Install of Pie Register is just as easy as any other Wordpress plug in. Setup is fairly easy and self explanatory. Going down the set up page, we allowed registrations to set their own password. This way upon approval, when they return to the site, they wouldn’t need to go looking for the email containing a random password. Because we’re using Classipress, our log in and registration page are already themed to the site so there was no need to enable Custom Logo. We did need Admin Verification and enabled Simple CAPTCHA. The next thing we did is check Additional Profile Fields for First Name, Last Name and Website, and we required these fields upon registration.

Pie Registration allows you to customize your User Notification Email. This is the email received by the user upon registration. This was an important edit because the user needed to understand that there is a verification process and could take up to two days. I made sure that the email included username, password, user’s website and a link back to the site, as well as a little notice about the verification process. Here’s what our customized email looks like:


Next up was customizing the Admin Notification Email. This is the most important part. How will you screen users if you don’t have their information? It was very important to include the user’s website in this email. Any other important information that might be necessary for approval should also be included, like first and last name.

Now you’re all set up! There is an area here for custom CSS, however it doesn’t seem to work. I seemed to only get results by adding the css to my regular css file, in the case of Classipress, the custom.css. Don’t spend too much time and frustration trying to style your fields here. I have not tested this with a regular Wordpress install, but since Classipress is simply a Wordpress theme, it seems to be it wouldn’t work.

Next up, Styling Pie-Register Registration Fields.

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