Usually, popular PHP development frameworks such as Zend, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, and Laravel don't provide a built-in user module. Developers tend to build their own user management modules and use them across many projects of the same framework. WordPress offers a built-in user management system to cater to common user management tasks found in web applications. Such things include the following:

• Managing user roles and capabilities
• A built-in user registration functionality
• A built-in user login functionality
• A built-in forgot password functionality

Developers are likely to encounter these tasks in almost all web applications. In most cases, these features and functions can be effectively used without significant changes in the code. However, web applications are much more advanced and hence we might need various customizations on these existing features. It's important...

In simple terms, user roles define the types of users in a system. WordPress offers built-in functions for working with every aspect of user roles. In this section, we will look at how we can manage these tasks by implementing the user roles for our application. We can create a new user role by calling the add_role function. The following code illustrates the basic form of user role creation:

    $result = add_role( 'role_name', 'Display Name', array( 
       'read' => true, 
       'edit_posts' => true, 
       'delete_posts' => false 
     ) ); 

The first parameter takes the role name, which is a unique key to identify the role. The second parameter will be the display name, which will be shown in the admin area. The final parameter will take the necessary capabilities of the user role. You can find out more about existing...

Capabilities can be considered as tasks which users are permitted to perform inside the application. A single user role can perform many capabilities, while a single capability can be performed by many user roles. Typically, we use the term "access control" for handling capabilities in web applications. Let's see how capabilities work inside WordPress.

Capabilities are always associated with user roles and hence we cannot create new capabilities without providing a user role. Let's look at the following code for associating custom capabilities with our member user roles created earlier in the Creating application user roles section:

    public function add_application_user_capabilities...

An administration panel is built into the WordPress framework, allowing us to log in through the admin screen. Therefore, we have a registration area which can be used to add new users by providing a username and e-mail. In web applications, registration can become complex, compared to the simple registration process in WordPress. Let's consider some typical requirements of the web application registration process in comparison with WordPress:

• User-friendly interface: An application can have different types of user roles. Until registration is completed, everyone is treated as a normal application user with the ability to view public content. Typically, users are used to seeing fancy registration forms inside the main site rather than a completely different login area such as with WordPress. Therefore, we need to explore the possibilities of adding WordPress registration to the...

Fortunately, we can make use of the existing functionalities to implement registration from the frontend. We can use a regular HTTP request or AJAX-based technique to implement this feature. In this book, I will focus on using normal HTTP POST requests instead of using AJAX. Our first task is to create the registration form in the frontend.

There are various ways to implement such forms in the frontend. Let's look at some of the possibilities as described in the following section:

• Shortcode implementation
• Page template implementation
• Custom template implementation

Now, let's look at the implementation of each of these techniques.

Shortcodes are the quickest way to add dynamic content to your...

The frontend login can be found in many WordPress websites, including small blogs. Usually, we place the login form in the sidebar of the website. In web applications, user interfaces are more complex and different compared to normal websites. Hence, we will implement a full-page login screen as we did with registration. First, we need to update our controller with another case for login, as shown in the following code:

    switch ( $control_action ) { 
      // Other cases 
      case 'login':                 
        do_action( 'wpwaf_before_login_form' ); 
        $wpwaf->login->display_login_form(); 
        break;  
    } 

We have used a new class called login to call this function. So we need to create a new class called WPWAF_Login inside the classes folder and do the object creation and file inclusion inside the WPWAF_Forum class as we did in previous...

As discussed throughout this chapter, user management is one of the most important tasks in web application development. Only limited types of applications can be built without needing user management. So we discussed some of the core user management features available in WordPress and we will be exploring more built-in user features in upcoming chapters.

The built-in user management features of WordPress focus more on the administrative side. There are very limited user management features for the user in the frontend of the application. Therefore, often we need to develop additional user management features for the frontend or use custom plugins that provide such features. In this section, we will be discussing some of the most important and commonly used user management features, as follows:

• Frontend login and registration
• Custom profile fields
• Private...

In the previous section, we discussed the need for custom user-related functionality in managing large web applications. We can use our own code to create all of the mentioned features to suit web applications. However, implementing these features from scratch is a highly time-consuming task requiring perfect planning. So we need to consider the type of application and the requirements before deciding to implement these features from scratch.

Usually, it's a wise decision to use an existing plugin-based solution in such scenarios, unless user management is the core feature of your application and existing solutions are not capable of handling your application requirements. We can find dozens of free and premium user management plugins by professional developers to manage the user-related tasks of your application. In the next section, we will be looking...

In this chapter, we have implemented a simple registration and login functionality from the frontend. Before we have a complete user creation and authentication system, there are plenty of other tasks to be completed. So, I would recommend you try out the following tasks in order to be comfortable with implementing such functionalities for web applications:

• Create a frontend functionality for lost passwords
• Block the default WordPress login page and redirect it to our custom page
• Include extra fields in the registration form

In this chapter, we have explored the basics of user roles and capabilities related to web application development. We were able to choose the user roles for our application considering the various possibilities provided by WordPress.

Next, we learned how to create custom routes in order to achieve an MVC-like process using the frontend controller and custom template system.

Finally, we looked at how we can customize the built-in registration and login process in the frontend to cater to advanced requirements in web application development.

By now, you should be capable of defining user roles and capabilities to match your application, creating custom routers for common modules, implementing custom controllers with custom template systems, and customizing the existing user registration and authentication process.

In the next chapter, we will look at how we can adapt the existing database of WordPress into...