You may have read my previous article about how I set up a web site for a private club with three levels of user access by using Peter’s Login Redirect, WP Hide Dashboard, Role Manager, and New User Email Setup plugins.

I’ve since discovered the User Access Manager plugin, which allows you to create user groups and give them access rights to selected posts and/or pages. You can even assign separate admin and user permissions within the group. Great for project sharing regardless of whether your WordPress site is public, private, or a mixture of the two.

Older versions of this plugin came with this warning:

“If you activate the plugin your upload dir will protect by a ‘.htaccess’ with a random password and all old downloads insert in a previous post/page will not work anymore. You have to update your posts/pages.”

The latest version of the plugin allows you to unlock these files so that they don’t appear broken. It also allows you to delete the .htaccess files if you should decide to deactivate the plugin. If you are using this plugin, make sure you have the latest version.

This plugin may be able to replace Role Manager, especially if all you want to do is control read access to posts and pages. Keep in mind that if you uninstall Role Manager your roles & capabilities will be left however you last set them. They will not be returned to default. At the moment there is some discussion among WordPress developers (including myself) about the possibility that modifying the default user roles causes conflicts with other plugins that use the Role feature (like Profiler and WordPress Users, both of which do not seem to work for people who have used Role Manager). We’ll see if either of the plugin authors can come up with a fix that takes modified roles into account.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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Recently I’ve been asked to do two web sites that have multiple access levels. One is for a graphic designer who wants a public site as well as things only her clients can see and things only her employees can see. The other is a private club that wants to give a very small amount of information to the public, and also wants separate access to information for two levels of membership. In both cases I used WordPress.

For the private club, I used the Role Manager plugin to create a Subscriber level that has access to pages marked Private, and another that has access to pages and posts marked Private. Thereby I created two levels of private access. See my article titled “Caveats for Emptors” for warnings about using the Role Manager plugin. You may prefer to use the User Access Manager plugin instead. I used it on the graphic designer’s site and will probably never use the Role Manager again.

To augment that, I added Peter’s Login Redirect plugin to both sites. This plugin allows you to redirect users to any page on the site by user name, role, numeric admin level, or “anyone else” (i.e. anyone not defined by the preceding criteria). The really nice thing about this plugin is not terribly obvious. If you have created a page or post that you only want one person or a defined group to see, you can send them there directly. Note that by default, links to pages marked Private will not appear in your WP navigation, and category links will only appear if there is at least one public post in the category. So, now you have a way of “hiding” information within your site. You could (for example) give your employees access to a category that contains protected posts about several projects and your clients a direct route to a specific page where their project is posted. Search  the WordPress plugins directory for the words login redirect and you will find similar plugins that may better suit your specific purposes. Beware of Weasel’s Login Redirect as it requires the Role Manager plugin to work.

Finally in both cases I used the Hide dashboard plugin and removed the Meta links from the sidebar so that Subscriber-level  visitors won’t mess with the login profiles.

Thanks WordPress!

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

Related posts:

1. WordPress User Access Management What’s the most fun you can have with a program that’s written for information sharing?...
2. WordPress Plugins – User Access Manager vs. Role Manager Do you want to control access to your pages & posts or your admin features?...
3. WordPress Plugins – Caveats for Emptors Here’s a list of WordPress plugins that didn’t work out for me and why. Keep...