Conditional WordPress Redirects

Today, we’re talking about conditional ways to redirect a user in WordPress based upon the page they are using to log in. As with all things I do in WordPress, whenever I get a new challenge that takes me a while, I feel the need to share it. Or at the very least, post it so if I ever need it again, I know where to go and grab it.

The latest challenge came from a client who needed an override for users logging in from one particular page. What was happening before was that all users from being sent to a page from the generalized redirect that was already on her website. I spent hours combing through the code of the site getting increasingly frustrated because how many places can someone hide a redirect? Only to realize within the span of a few seconds that the redirect was not being handled in code–but using a plugin. Augh.

After disabling the redirect handled by plugin, the challenge then became how to properly redirect users to a specific page when they were logging in from another specific page. Now, this could be accomplished through user role set-up and using a redirect plugin, but I balked at the hours of tedious work labeling the users who would use one specific page who needed to just access another specific page that wasn’t going to be handled by the redirect. I knew there had to be a way to detect what page a user was coming from and redirect them accordingly.

The Generalized Redirect

First thing’s first, I had to put the direct back in since I disabled it in the plugin. So here’s the redirect that will send all users logging into the page to a specific page…

function login_redirect( $redirect_to, $request, $user) {
return 'site address here';
}
add_filter('login_redirect', 'login_redirect', 10, 3);

That piece of code up there, when you replace ‘site address here’ with your own URL, will send all users logging into your site using your login form to the specified page.

Conditional Redirect Based on Page

The next step was write a conditional statement that evaluated whether the user was coming from a specific page or not. I relied on a very good StackOverflow answer for this one. You can find the original answer here: Thanks to Dominor Novus on StackOverflow

function login_redirect( $redirect_to, $request, $user ){
  if (stripos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], 'page-permalink-address') !== false) {
    return 'other site address here';
  } else
    return 'site address here';
  }
add_filter( 'login_redirect', 'login_redirect', 10, 3 );

Up there, you are going in using PHP to detect, within the referring website, if a specific query, name or permalink address exists. If it does exist, then your login redirect will send the user to the other site address. Otherwise, if it does not exist, it will send the user to the original site address using the regular redirect.

All this boils down to using a basic if/else conditional. Where I really needed the help was finding out how to get the page to detect the origin site address. Once that was in there, we were open for business. I hope this write up helps someone else struggling to figure out how to override a redirect without having to set up a complicated user role system and use a redirecting plugin.

 


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