Front Desk WordPress Plugin

Front Desk is a plugin for WordPress that adds login, registration, password recovery and reset, and profile editing functionality to the front-end of a WordPress site.

Menu integration is also built-in and when enabled, it will add login, password recovery, and register links to non-logged-in users and edit profile and log out links to logged-in users. There is also an option to add a wp-admin link to logged-in admin users and an option to hide the admin toolbar.

The forms can be themed using the Theme functionality. Some simple layouts are provided to help with the general look and feel of the forms. Custom CSS can also be entered to further style the forms. It’s up to the user to add colors or tweak the overall appearance of the forms.

Gettings Started with Front-End

After installing the plugin to your WordPress website, you will see that a new menu item will be added to your admin area. Under the new Front End menu, you’ll see pages where you’ll be able to customize the look and behavior of the forms.

Theme

In the Theme page, you can select the basic layouts that you want each form to use. You can also add custom CSS to add more styling to your forms.

Pages

This part is the most crucial but is a set-and-forget section. Just create the corresponding pages for the form and link them through this page. This is useful if you want to control the permalinks of the forms your users would be using.

Menu Integration

You can enable menu integration to add the following pages to the selected menu.

• For logged-in users
  • Edit Profile
  • Logout
  • WP Admin (for admins, if enabled)
• For logged-out users
  • Login
  • Register
  • Password Recovery

Settings

In the settings page, you can configure the behavior that the plugin imposes on your WordPress site. You can open or close registration for new users, disable the default WP login page, restrict non-admin user access to WP Admin, and hide the admin toolbar.

The features above are useful if you want to hide the fact that you’re running WordPress on your site from most of your users. Please note though, that some tech-savvy users will still be able to find out.

Finishing Up

Pro Tip: This plugin adds a linked stylesheet to all the pages, therefore adding another request to the server. To make sure your website is fast and responsive, you can install Frank Goossens‘ Autoptimize plugin. Autoptimize merges all stylesheets, both linked and inline, into one stylesheet so there is ever only one request for all stylesheets.

Download Front Desk

You can download Front Desk from the WordPress Plugin Repository. To following along with the bleeding edge of things and the current development status, you can go to the Front Desk’s GitHub page.

If you have any questions, suggestions, or feature requests, just comment below or send me a message.