Customize your WordPress login without a plugin

Wordpress users know that the login page is pretty cool looking.  However it could be enhanced more with a little customizing.  Using a plugin you can change colors and graphics real easy as you can see with the photowalklist login page.  However you can easily customize the login just by changing a graphic.

This was made using the BM Custom Login WordPress plugin

Find the graphic by heading to the following URL:

http://YOURDOMAIN.COM/wp-admin/images/logo-login.gif

Now that you found it, just download the original WordPress graphic and customize it to your liking.  Below you can see mine.

While backing up is always a good thing it is not necessary to backup the original WordPress logo because any updates will contain the logo in its original place anyway.  I did back up the original and my replacement so when WordPress has future updates I can put my logo back in place.

WPRecipes.com posted the following code meant for the functions.php WordPress file. This too would be replaced once WordPress is updated. However this code could be converted for the Thesis the custom_functions.php as an easy replacement.  Putting it in the Thesis functions would in turn make it so you don’t have to think about replacing the logo in the future.

function my_custom_login_logo() {
    echo '<style type="text/css">
        h1 a { background-image:url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/custom-login-logo.gif) !important; }
    </style>';
}

add_action('login_head', 'my_custom_login_logo');

Thanks for reading and happy blogging,

Scott