Auto approve a user on registration in WP Admin

Ultimate Member allows site owners to control how new user accounts are approved when they register through your website. This is important for protecting your site’s security, ensuring only verified users gain access, and customizing how your community operates.

Managing Registration Approval Per Role

Each user role in Ultimate Member can have its own registration approval rules. To set this:

1. Go to wp-admin → Ultimate Member → User Roles
2. Click Edit Role on the role you want to configure.
3. Scroll down to the Registration Options section.

You’ll find several choices:

• Auto Approve – The user is instantly approved after registration.
• Require Email Activation – The user must confirm their email address to activate the account.
• Require Admin Review – A site administrator must manually approve the account.
• Pending Review – The user remains in a pending state until approved, but no email is sent.

These settings apply when users register through Ultimate Member forms on your site’s frontend.

Auto-Approve Admin-Created Users

Previously, when an administrator manually created a new user via wp-admin → Users → Add New, the user would still follow the role’s Registration Options. This could lead to issues where admin-created users might:

• Require email activation
• End up in a pending status
• Wait for admin review unnecessarily (even though an admin created them)

To address this, Ultimate Member version 2.10.3 introduces a new setting:

Ignore the "User Role > Registration Options" setting for users created in wp-admin

How it works:
When this setting is enabled:

• Any new user created from the wp-admin → Users → Add User is automatically approved and ready to use the site immediately. This applies even if the user role’s “Registration Options” are set to Admin Approval, Pending Review, or Email Activation.
• This ensures admin-created users skip the usual approval workflows like email activation or pending status, because if an admin created them, there’s no need for extra verification. This setting bypasses any configured approval process for the selected user role when a user is created by an administrator via the WordPress dashboard. Regardless of whether the role requires email activation, admin approval, or pending review, the user will be automatically approved upon creation.

To enable it:

1. Go to wp-admin → Ultimate Member → Settings → General →  Users.
2. Enable the “Ignore the 'User Role > Registration Options' ”

For Older Versions (Before UM v2.10.3) — Using Custom Code

If you’re using an earlier version of Ultimate Member or want custom control, you can use a PHP snippet to auto-approve admin-created users.

Why would you need this?
Because in versions before 2.10.3, even admin-created users could get stuck in an inactive or pending state if the role required activation.

Example custom code:

What this does:

• Hooks into the user creation process.
• Checks if the user is being created by an admin.
• If so, it immediately sets the account status to approved, bypassing any other activation requirements like email approval, admin review, or puts the account on pending status.

Summary