Month: June 2014

Password Protected is one of my favorite plugins for WordPress and I use it regularly. More often than not a site needs to go online for client approval and/or the last parts of development before it’s actually ready. That’s when Password Protected really comes in handy. It’s a very easy little plugin to use that does nothing more than you want it to do. It password protects your WordPress site.

When the password page is supposed to be up for more than a few days you might want to customize it. You don’t want to hack the plugin of course but the author has added a filter hook for us to use. In the core plugin file you’ll find this line

$theme_file = apply_filters( 'password_protected_theme_file', $default_theme_file );

This allows us to jump in and replace the theme file with our own theme file. Here is a quick way of doing that. First, make a copy of password-protected/theme/login.php file which is located in the WordPress plugin directory. Leave the copy in the same folder, but rename it to for example “my-custom-login.php”. Then you need to add the filter to your themes function.php file.

function custom_login_page($content) {
    return str_replace('login.php', 'my-custom-login.php', $content);
}
add_filter( 'password_protected_theme_file', 'custom_login_page' );

Now you can hack away at the file “my-custom-login.php” as much as you like without any risk of breaking the core plugin files. Add styles, images, scripts whatever you need to make that login page look fabulous.