Make certain blog posts only visible to your friends
Though I’m finally used to the whole “blogging in public” thing, there are some things that just aren’t suitable for showing to the world! I thought about having a separate blog with a login for my friends and family but I really don’t want to design and manage a second site, so instead I hide some posts from the public: if you aren’t logged in you wouldn’t even know you’re missing anything! I wanted my friends to be able to sign up easily, but for me to have to approve them before they can sign in. Here’s how I did it.
1. Download and install the plugins
Download and install the Private Plus and Register Plus plugins, and activate them in Settings > Plugins.
2. Set up Private Plus
In Settings > privatePlus tell the plugin you want Subscribers to be able to view private posts.
3. Set up Register Plus
Next you can set up the new registration options that Register Plus offers. Tell it you want to approve all new users so that you can check you know who they are.
It’s up to you what else you set up here, but I have set it to ask for my friends’ full names in case I don’t recognise their email addresses.
4. Write a post
You’re all set to begin writing private posts! When you write a post tick the “Keep this post private” box above the Publish button. Instead of only being visible to Editors and Administrators (the normal behaviour of this tick box), it will now be visible to anyone who is logged in. You can see it is labelled with “Private:” in front of the title when you see the post on your website. Log out and you’ll see it disappear!
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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This is a thorough description of the methods taken to keep certain posts visible to individuals who are logged in. I would add that one can also create WordPress pages, which can be nested within eachother, and not link to them from the site’s root page. This could allow the URLs to be released to certain individuals to show them a certain page. I am not sure as of yet as to how to keep these hidden pages from being hidden to Google, for example, but I would assume that there would be a way.
[...] Re: You you consider Wordpress a poor mans choice of membership? Make certain blog posts only visible to your friends - The WordPress Magazine [...]
This is a good plugin.
My only think I found wrong with it, is that I would like to have the option to force certain user levels to have their posts published as private entries.
Kind of a weird request, I know
Otherwise, great job!
Danny, I guess that’s something completely different from the two plugins used here, as it’s changing a part of WordPress’s default behaviour rather than that of the plugins.
Have a look at the conversation at http://wordpress.org/support/topic/172732 for some ideas!
I just wrote this plugin that may be another alternative to this situation. It essentially allows you to flag a post as “low profile”, and hide it from the homepage and/or from your RSS feed.
You can download it from here: http://robertmahfoud.konceptus.net/posts/wp-low-profiler/
Once a post is “low profile” you could send the permalink out to your friends so they can see it without having to log-in.
Please let me know if you found it useful.
There is good quality writing on here, which is not something I can say about all websites. Thanks alot.
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