For those of you who frequently log into and comment on various WordPress blogs (and you know who you are), you may have noticed that the login page is conspicuously unthemed, and looks virtually the same on every WordPress blog on the internet. The savvy user may also have noticed that the login page on this blog is themed. Go ahead, take a look. I’ll wait…

Pretty cool, eh? I submitted a patch via Trac for version 2.3.3 back in February, and updated it today to be compatible with 2.5.1. Well, if the Milestones on the ticket are to be believed, the plan is to incorporate this feature into version 2.6. If you can’t wait that long to pimp your login page, you can get the patch and sample login.php theme page from the Trac ticket. Just patch wp-login.php in your WordPress folder and drop the login.php file in your theme.  Use your own css to style the form, and the new login page will pull in your theme’s header, footer and sidebar, just like any other page.

UPDATE: Looks like they didn’t like the approach that I took for the patch, so they’ve pushed this feature back to 2.7 to give it some more development time.  To each his own, I guess.  I’ll be reworking this patch and resubmitting soon.