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I prefer to keep things the way they are on this website as long as they’re working and I’m satisfied. However, I thought I would experiment with this new user management plugin for a few days before writing a review, but I decided to stick with it.
ProfilePress is a new WordPress user management plugin by a friend and after installing it just to see how it works, I was wowed with all the features I saw on the settings page.
Introducing ProfilePress
Compared with UPME or UserPro, Profilepress is a relatively new plugin, but it has an edge over these existing plugins. ProfilePress isn’t just a user management plugin, it is a complete profile management plugin that allows you to fully customize your user’s experience in relation to their accounts.
I was able to customize almost everything the way I wanted. There are different themes for login, registration, profile, edit profile page, and even password retrieval page.
The best thing about the plugin is that you can create your own themes or customize existing ones to taste with little or no coding skills. The user interface is quite easy to use.
Key Features
The plugin is loaded with features and here are the key features:
Create custom profile fields
As expected, the plugin allows you to create more profile fields and customize them the way you want.
Profile fields can be of any of these types:
- Text field
- Textarea
- Select box
- Radio button
- Checkbox
You can customize the description of the fields making it easier for your users to understand.
Manage login/logout redirections
If you want your users to be redirected to a specific page after logging in or logging out, ProfilePress got you covered. This can be customized too from the settings.
A great idea is creating a page with special shortcodes where users are redirected immediately after logging in. You can also choose to redirect users to the site homepage after logging out.
Customize registration/approval/password reset emails
Want to sound friendly in the welcome message you send to new members? This plugin allows you to customize that as well.
You don’t get to customize just the welcome message, the emails sent when users are approved, retrieving forgotten passwords, or blocked can be edited to taste.
Customize login/registration/edit profile forms
This can be described as the most important feature this plugin offers. With little or no knowledge in CSS/HTML, you can create custom forms to go with your installed theme.
The built-in TinyMCE editor is where you enter the raw codes for the form, there’s a CSS code area and an area you can preview the form live as you build it.
Even if you don’t have much CSS knowledge, you can still choose from the ready made themes.
Customize front-end user profile style
The current version has 3 profile themes each styled differently from the others. You can customize the default ones or create yours. I went ahead to customize the default Smiley profile theme and this is what I came up with:
One of the default profile themes is the Dixon theme which has a beautiful layout too.
Still not satisfied with the included forms and you don’t have enough coding knowledge to customize yours? You can still purchase more themes from the developer website here.
Social Login
You can allow your users to login in with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and GitHub.
Shortcodes
The form builder has several shortcodes you can use to quickly create forms. Also, implementing the forms on your pages is quite easy as shortcodes are automatically generated for each form you build.
In-built Widgets
ProfilePress has six default widgets you can use. It includes a tabbed widget containing a login form, a registration form and a password retrieval form.
Pricing
There’s a free version of this plugin available for download in the WordPress plugin repository but the features are very much limited limited when compare with the premium version.
To enjoy everything the plugin has to offer, you need to go for the premium version. There are 3 different licenses:
- Personal ($39): Supports one website
- Business ($99): Supports three websites
- Developer($199): Supports unlimited websites
All licenses come with one year access to upgrades. There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee subject to terms and conditions. You can read more from the pricing page.
Verdict
Some features included with the plugin saved me the trouble of installing extra plugins to perform certain functions and that’s a pretty good thing.
Allowing you to create custom forms lets you improve users experience on your site and when you combine this sort of plugin with other plugins like Front-End Editor, you can completely stop your users from seeing the ugly WordPress backend dashboard.
However, there are some features I would love to see in future updates. This includes a Visual Form editor to create forms, a shortcode to list members, a member search shortcode in the front-end, and a few others.
In conclusion, it’s a plugin I intend to use for a very long time to come provided updates are regularly pushed and support remains great as it is at the moment.