I Am Blogie

This is especially useful for corporate or community websites that make use of WordPress as a content management system: a custom login / registration page for your WordPress-powered site. For websites with multiple authors or subscribers who log in to the dashboard a lot, don’t you think the default login screen below is rather bland?

If you agree with me, then it’s time to skin that screen, and get something like this:

Think “branding” and “user experience”.

For some of my WordPress deployments, I now use the plugin called, aptly enough, Theme My Login. What it does is, it replaces the default WP login page with your active theme’s page template, where it embeds the login or registration interface. The new look and feel of your site’s login screen will surely build more loyalty and promote a feel good experience among your subscribers.

The plugin’s compatible with WP2.8, and lets you define the messages that appear on the customized page. I just wish that the plugin author would add more options in succeeding updates. For sure, the ability to apply layout settings and stuff, without having to do code, will be most welcome to plenty of end users.

Still, this plugin is much better than Register Plus, a similar plugin that I’d written about before. It even generates a widget for you to put a login box on your sidebar. When logged in, the widget can show your Gravatar and links to the dashboard, etc.

Have fun with your login pages!

Need to publish events on your WordPress-powered blog? Here’s a great plugin for just that:   Events. It’s what I use for my Upcoming Events section on AngDabawenyo.com. See it in action

There are, however, a few things that I’d like to see added to this plugin’s features. My wish list:

• Image uploader and corresponding settings for display of uploaded images; or, integration with WordPress’ media library
• Improved html/php parser — when inserting event details text in the sidebar widget, html code is not parsed properly, which results in unterminated html containers
• Google Maps integration

Do you blog about geeky stuff like coding how-to’s? Do you publish visible code on your blog posts? Here’s a nifty plugin for that: FV Code Highlighter. See how it works here and here.

It displays your code in its own space, and there’s even syntax highlighting! The plugin author’s site doesn’t say so, but it actually works with the <pre> HTML container. No need to use those curly braces thingies as detailed in the plugin homepage. Also, it works just fine on WordPress 2.8.