WordPress 5.3: Site Admin Email Verification Screen

In WordPress 5.3, a new screen has been introduced to help ensure the site’s administration email remains accurate and up to date. The site’s adminadmin (and super admin) email (as defined when installing WordPress, and found on the Settings > General page) is a critical part of every WordPress site. This new screen will help site owners remain in full control of their site, even as years go by.

How does this work?

By default, administrators will see a screen after logging in that lists the site’s admin email address once every 6 months.

They are presented with 4 actions:

1. The site’s email is verified as correct: After clicking “The email is correct” button, the user is taken to the Dashboard with an admin notice saying “Thank you for verifying”. The screen will be hidden for 6 months from all administrators.
2. The site’s email needs to be changed: After clicking the “Update” button, the user is taken to the Settings > General page where they can update the site’s email address. Administrators will be presented with the verification screen the next time they log in.
3. The user clicks “Remind me later”: the user is taken to the Dashboard. Administators will see the screen again after 3 days have passed.
4. Back to “Site Name”: When this link is clicked, the user will be taken to the site’s home page. Administrators will be presented with the verification screen the next time they log in.

Available Actions and Filters

Actions

There are a few action hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. on the verification page that developers can use to customize the screen.

• admin_email_confirm – Fires before the admin email confirm form.
• admin_email_confirm_form – Fires inside the admin-email-confirm-form form tagtag A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses tags to store a single snapshot of a version (3.6, 3.6.1, etc.), the common convention of tags in version control systems. (Not to be confused with post tags.), but before any other output.

A new action hook after the form was not introduced. Instead, use the login_footer action, which is called just after the closing </form> tag. The if ( 'confirm_admin_email' === $_GET['action'] ) conditional can be used to check that the email verification screen is being shown.

Filters

One new filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output., admin_email_check_interval, has also been introduced. This filter can be used to change the frequency that administrators should see the verification screen.

The following example changes the interval from the default of 6 months to 2 months:

<?php
function myplugin_admin_email_check_interval( $interval ) {
	return 2 * MONTH_IN_SECONDS;
}
add_filter( 'admin_email_check_interval', 'myplugin_admin_email_check_interval' );

Note: The returned value should always be in seconds.

This filter can also be used to disable the feature by returning a “falsey” value, such as 0, or false.

The following example will disable the admin email verification check:

<?php
add_filter( 'admin_email_check_interval', '__return_false' );

For more information about these changes, check out #46349 in TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress..

Props to @desrosj for peer review.

#5-3, #admin, #dev-notes