Login

In this article you can learn the various ways of customizing the Umbraco backoffice login screen and form.

To access the backoffice, you will need to login. You can do this by adding /umbraco at the end of your website URL, e.g. http://mywebsite.com/umbraco.

You will be presented with a login form similar to this:

Login screen

The login screen contains a Greeting, Email, Password field and optionally a Forgotten password link

Below, you will find instructions on how to customise the login screen.

Greeting

The login screen features a greeting which you can personalize by overriding the existing language translation keys. To do this, create a 'user' translation file for the default language of your Umbraco site, (usually en-US) to override the greetings. For en-US, you'd create a file called: en_us.user.xml in the directory ~/config/lang/. Then take the relevant keys (listed below) and add them to your ~/config/lang/en_us.user.xml file, and update the greetings as necessary. Note: the config directory needs to be in the root of your project (not the wwwroot).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<language culture="en-US">
	<area alias="login">
		<key alias="greeting0">Happy super Sunday</key>
		<key alias="greeting1">Happy manic Monday</key>
		<key alias="greeting2">Happy tubular Tuesday</key>
		<key alias="greeting3">Happy wonderful Wednesday</key>
		<key alias="greeting4">Happy thunderous Thursday</key>
		<key alias="greeting5">Happy funky Friday</key>
		<key alias="greeting6">Happy Caturday</key>
	</area>
</language>

You can customize other text on the login screen as well. First, grab the default values and keys from ~/umbraco/config/lang/en.xml. Thereafter copy the ones you want to translate into ~/config/lang/en_us.user.xml file. Note: the new /config/ folder needs to be created at the site root.

Password reset

The Forgotten password? link allows your backoffice users to reset their password. To use this feature, you will need to add the following key to the Umbraco.Cms.Security section in the appsettings.json file:

"Umbraco": {
    "CMS": {
      "Security": { 
        "AllowPasswordReset": true
      }
   }
}

Set it to true to enable the password reset feature, and false to disable the feature.

You will also need to configure an Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server in your appsettings.json file. When you get a successful result on the SMTP configuration when running a health check in the backoffice, you are good to go!

An example:

"Umbraco": {
    "CMS": {
      "Global": {
        "Id": "xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx",
        "Smtp": {
          "From": "[e-mail]",
          "Host": "127.0.0.1",
          "Username": "username",
          "Password": "password"
        }
      }
    }
}

Custom background image and logo

It is possible to customize the background image and the logo for the backoffice login screen by adding the "Content" section in the appsettings.json file:

"Umbraco": {
    "CMS": {
      "Content": {
        "LoginBackgroundImage": "../myImagesFolder/myLogin.jpg",
        "LoginLogoImage": "../myImagesFolder/myLogo.svg"
      }
   }
} 

The LoginBackgroundImage and LoginLogoImage are referenced from the /wwwroot/umbraco/ folder.

To affect the styling of the images add a folder to the /App_Plugins folder containing a CSS folder, containing a CSS file, and a package.manifest file. An example structure might be:

/App_Plugins
    /myLoginFolder
        /css
            /myLoginStyles.css
        /package.manifest

An example stylesheet might be:

    .login-overlay {
    	background-color: #000;
    }
    
    .login-overlay__background-image {
    /* Override background image opacity here if needed */
    /* opacity is set to 0.05 by default if background images is set */
    	/*opacity:0.05;*/
    	opacity:0;
    	background-size:contain;
    	background-image: none;
    }
    
    div.login-overlay__logo {
    	width: 10%;
    }

An example package.manifest might be:

    {
    css: [
        '~/App_Plugins/myLoginFolder/css/myLoginStyles.css'
        ]
    }