Have you ever thought to add a login panel to your site? I worked on one lately for a site with multiple contributors. With WordPress it is a simple task, that you might want to do, if you want your visitors to sign in for any reason.
Instead of having your visitors go to the WordPress login panel, you can save them the extra click by presenting a login form in the home page of your site.

This is a great way to manage your site, if you allow only signed in users to comment or post, or if you want to add subscriber only content, or material that only subscribers can download from your site.

In the sidebar of you site you can just add the following html form code to accept user id and password.

Edit sidebar.php file under your theme. Just pick an area where you want to add the form by adding the following code after any </li> tag depending on where you want to display the form. Ideally you want to display it at the top of your sidebar.

<li>
<?php if (is_user_logged_in()){
echo “<h2>Welcome! </h2>”; ?>

<ul>
<li><a href=”<?php echo wp_logout_url(get_permalink()); ?>”>Logout</a></li>
</ul>
<?php } else { ?>

<form name=”loginform” id=”login” action=”<?php echo get_settings(’siteurl’); ?>/wp-login.php” method=”post”>
<h2>Account Login</h2>
<label for=”userid”>Userid:</label>
<input type=”text” name=”log” value=”" id=”userid” size=”15″/><br />
<label for=”password”>Password:</label>
<input type=”password” name=”pwd” value=”" id=”password” size=”10″/>
<input type=”submit” name=”submit” value=”Login” id=”enter” />
<p><?php wp_register(”, ”); ?>
<p><a href=”<?php bloginfo(’wpurl’); ?>/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword”>Lost your password?</a></p>
</form>

<?php } ?>

</li>

This above php/html will do a basic form where:

<?php if (is_user_logged_in()){

Checks if anyone is logged in, then prints “Welcome registered user”and displays a link to log out, else if no one is logged in, it displays the login form.

This is a basic html form where:

<h2>Account Login</h2>

is the title of the form

<label for=”userid”>Userid:</label>

to assigns an informative label.

<input type=”text” name=”log” value=”" id=”userid” size=”15″/><br />

text box to accept user input to a text field. Note: Here you can add the optional size argument to any size that fits your sidebar area.
There are about 10 specific types to the <input /> tag. In any simple login form you will need to use 3.
1-text: for entering text. 2-password: to enter a password, and 3- submit: which creates a submit button.

<p><?php wp_register(”,”); ?>

you might want to add this line if you want to allow your visitors to register.

Let me know, if you have any questions about it.
Regards.

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