User login by email in wordpress is not working

Question

I have been trying to enable the user login by email. I found at wordpress codex and some few blogs the way to write the following code in functions.php

add_action( 'wp_authenticate', 'wp_authenticate_by_email' );

function wp_authenticate_by_email( $username ) {
$user = get_user_by( 'email', $username );

   if ( empty( $user ) ) {
       return;
   }

return $user->user_login;
}

But it does not work for me. I found it is remained as earlier.

Answer 1

I had a similar issue but got this to work:

function my_authenticate_by_email( $user, $username, $password ) {
    //try to get user by email
    $user = get_user_by( 'email', $username );
    //validate we got a user.
    if ($user && !is_wp_error($user))
    {
        //use normal auth
        return wp_authenticate_username_password(null, $user->user_login, $password); 
    }
    //continue to next filter, like normal.
    return null;
}
add_filter( 'authenticate', 'my_authenticate_by_email', 0, 3);