Wordpress Right approach in doing this signup process

Question

I am not sure if I can ask this one here, but here it goes!

I have a client who wants me to have 3 steps when a user signs up on our wordpress site.

On the first step.. There will be a domain availability checker. If the domain is available, they will proceed on the second step.

On the second step.. There will be fields such as:

• "Email Address"
• "First Name"
• "Last Name"
• A Theme/Template selection

Third Step..

PayPal Integration. This will be the payment page.

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As of now, I am developing this one with the use of these plugins:

• Pro Sites
• New Blog Templates

The only problem I have or shall I say a question in my mind is that.. what is the right approach in doing this signup process?

Should I edit the wp-signup.php? Can the wp-signup.php do those steps I mentioned above? Is that too hard to do?

Should I download a plugin that would easily modify the wp-signup look? But would those plugin work correctly with these plugins: "Pro Sites" and "New Blog Templates"?

I'm not that good in Wordpress or shall I call myself a newbie, but I think Wordpress has a lot of hacks or I just don't know what i'm talking about.

If you could provide a code or what that will be greatly appreciated!

Thank You! :)

Answer 1

There is no need to mess up with wp-signup.php, and you should never modify core files!

Wordpress provides a thing called hooks, with that you can "extend" any funcionality or make it your own taste

There are a ton of hooks you can use, like 'before_signup_form for example.

Well, what I would do, is to use the power of User and User meta tables for storing all the content you need, since you have name and email, that's all the info you need for Wordpress to create a user, so if you want to you might take a look at these functions

wp_create_user();
add_user_meta();

Create your own page to register users.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/register_new_user (/wp_create_user) (/add_user_meta)