AA Signin Widget vs Apocalypse Meow

AA Signin Widget offers a responsive sign-in form that can be added to your site using either a shortcode or a widget. Features Responsive signin form with mobile-first design Multiple premium-style templates to choose from Live preview of the signin form in the admin panel Custom color pickers for background and button styles Brand logo upload support with WordPress media uploader hCaptcha integration with toggle and key input Shortcode support for embedding the signin form anywhere Clean and modern admin interface (single-page settings) Multilingual-ready with translation support Modular code structure (separate files for maintainability) How to use it Install and activate the AA Signin Widget plugin from your WordPress dashboard. Go to Admin > AA Signin Widget to configure settings like template, colors, logo, and hCaptcha. Choose a template and customize colors or upload your brand logo as needed. Enable hCaptcha by adding your site key and secret (optional). Use the shortcode `[signin]` or `[signinform]` on any page or post to display the signin form. Add the widget from Appearance > Widgets to display the signin form in your sidebar or footer. Save your settings and preview the signin form live in the admin panel. Installation Download the AA Signin Widget plugin ZIP file. Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard. Go to Plugins > Add New and click Upload Plugin. Select the downloaded ZIP file and click Install Now. After installation, click Activate Plugin. Navigate to AA Signin Widget in the admin menu to configure the plugin. Screenshots screenshot-1 screenshot-2 Changelog Version 1.0.1 (2025-06-02) Added brand logo upload, color customization, and live admin preview Introduced premium template styles and hCaptcha support Improved responsiveness and separated plugin files for better maintainability Initial release with shortcode, widget, and basic login form

Apocalypse Meow’s main focus is addressing WordPress security issues related to user accounts and logins. This includes things like: Brute-force login-in protection; Customizable password strength requirements; XML-RPC access controls; Account access alerts; Searchable access logs (including failed login attempts and temporary bans); User enumeration prevention; Registration SPAM protection; Miscellaneous Core and template options to make targeted hacks more difficult; Anonymize/scrub leaky remote request headers; Security is an admittedly technical subject, but Apocalypse Meow strives to help educate “normal” users about the nature of common web attacks, mitigation techniques, etc. Every option contains detailed explanations and links to external resources with additional information. Knowledge is power! Requirements Due to the advanced nature of some of the plugin features, there are a few additional server requirements beyond what WordPress itself requires: WordPress 4.4+. PHP 7.4 or later. PHP extensions: (bcmath or gmp), date, filter, json, pcre. CREATE and DROP MySQL grants. Single-site Installs (i.e. Multi-Site is not supported). Please note: it is not safe to run WordPress atop a version of PHP that has reached its End of Life. Future releases of this plugin might, out of necessity, drop support for old, unmaintained versions of PHP. To ensure you continue to receive plugin updates, bug fixes, and new features, just make sure PHP is kept up-to-date. 🙂 Log Monitoring Some robots are so dumb they’ll continue trying to submit credentials even after the login form is replaced, wasting system resources and clogging up the log-in history table. One way to mitigate this is to use a server-side log-monitoring program like Fail2Ban or OSSEC to ban users via the firewall. Apocalypse Meow produces a 403 error when a banned user requests the login form. Your log-monitoring rule should therefore look for repeated 403 responses to wp-login.php. Additionally, some robots are unable to follow redirects; if your login form requires SSL, you should also ban repeated 301/302 responses to catch those fools. If you have enabled user enumeration protection with the die() option, requests for ?author=X will produce a 400 response code which can be similarly tracked. Privacy Policy When active, this plugin retains security logs of every sign-in attempt made to the CMS backend. This information — including the end user’s public IP address, username, and the status of his or her attempt — is used to help prevent unauthorized system access and maintain Quality of Service for all site visitors. This information resides fully on the hosting web site and is not shared with any third parties. Data retention is entirely up to the site operator, but by default old records are automatically removed after 90 days. Please note: Apocalypse Meow DOES NOT integrate with any WordPress GDPR “Personal Data” features. (Selective erasure of audit logs would undermine the security mechanisms provided by this plugin. Haha.)