Easy Custom WordPress Login Page

Without too much code hacking or any plugins.

(For 2.5 up to 2.6.5. Not for WordPress 2.7)
I really wanted to change one website’s login page but I didn’t want to install a plugin.

I’d done so for another site which was awesome but it really hooked it’s little self into that site and it was hard to get rid of even after I deleted it and deactivated it.

I just wanted to change a few little things and thought installing a plugin was overkill.

So I stopped Googling and just thought for a second.

What if I just make a simple alteration to the login.css?

You find it in wp-admin/css/.

I had a logo that was roughly the size of the wordpress header image and I just replaced the WordPress logo with my client’s.

Line 41 in login.css
background: url(path to the image you want to use) no-repeat;
Just put in the path to the logo: i. e. : /wp-content/themes/your theme/images/logo.jpg

Change the link embedded in the header: wp-login.php
[php]<div id="login"><h1><a href="<?php echo apply_filters(‘login_headerurl’, ‘http://yourwebaddress’); ?>" title="<?php echo apply_filters(‘login_headertitle’, __(‘your title text’)); ?>"><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></a></h1>[/php]

Replace http://yourwebaddress with your url that you want to use.

Replace ‘your title text” with what you want the title text to read when you hover your mouse over it.

Optional
Line 270 is where you can change the are “you lost question” text.

Upgrading
You’ll have to repeat this each time you upgrade automatically. If you upgrade manually please check the revision log to see if the files mentioned here have been changed and so need to be overwritten and then re patched with your changes.