Why would the CiviCRM menu or theme css appear on frontend pages on Wordpress?

Question

When I am logged in as a civicrm admin, or anyone with civicrm privs, the menubar is showing up on event registration pages when linked to directly. In addition, backend theme css loads on the frontend too.

This does not happen when i embed an event registration shortcode on a page. Only when going directly to the event registration page in CiviCRM.

https://example.org/civicrm/event/register/?id=10&reset=1

When not logged in, the menu does not appear, but the backend theme css still seems to load on front facing pages. This happens with any civicrm theme I use.

If I select a different front end theme in civicrm settings, it makes no difference.

Answer 1

If you're on a CiviCRM page as a user with CiviCRM privileges, you will see the CiviCRM menu, including on public facing pages. This is the default behavior that I have observed across Drupal and WordPress.

WordPress does not have an administration theme the way that Drupal does, so public facing CiviCRM pages are going to pull in CiviCRM stylesheets when rendering that container. I would suggest installing the WordPress "CiviCRM Admin Utilities" plugin, and with that you can set it to prevent CiviCRM stylesheets from loading. This way your theme should take over all of the styling on these pages. You will most likely need to define some additional css in your theme to get things looking good.

Answer 2

The menu shows because the direct registration pages are in Civi. As such, you're going to see the Civi menu because you have permission to see it when inside Civi.

When you use the shortcode and put it on a WP page, you're no longer in Civi, so the menu doesn't show.

I can't answer the part about the theme, as I use Drupal. But in Drupal, I have two settings - one is for the Admin part of Civi and the other is for the public pages for Civi. The public pages part is what shows for me on registration pages regardless of whether I am logged in or not.