Both of my children known my wife and I have blogs, and they’ve wanted their own sites to post their artwork and pictures and write about the things that are important to them. So I went ahead and created a couple subdomains and installed WordPress. But since they’re still young, I wanted to password protect the entire site so only logged in users can view their blogs — that way I can give a guest username/password to family members who might be interested, while locking everyone else out.
The bizarre thing is that WordPress does not support this out of the box. If you want to do this with WordPress, you’re going to have to install a plugin. And — lucky me — all of the plugins that do this are broken because WordPress changed how it handles authentication cookies in 2.5. I ended up downloading Angusman’s Authenticated WordPress Plugin, then modified the code to take into account WP’s new preferred authenticaton method, but it was a pain.
What makes this particular feature a bit odd by its absence is that Automattic does offer folks who sign up for a blog at WordPress.Com the option to hide their blog, so its not like this is a feature (like caching) where the devs are just idiots and think nobody wants that.
Given how simple the code to make a site private is, it is silly that this capability isn’t already integrated into WordPress.
Hello Brian,
I, too, am trying to make a private WordPress blog that I will host myself and have run into the same difficulties you described. Would you please send me your update/rewrite of Angusman’s Authenticated WordPress Plugin? I would very much appreciate it.
Thanks,
Lance
There is an explanation of how to modify Angusman’s plugin here. Note, the one drawback to this is that when you log in it initially dumps the user into the Dashboard rather than the site. Other than that, it seems to work fine.
Man, WordPress really is a blogging tool that’s being all plasticman’d into a real tool, isn’t it? Bummer.
LOL. I love Plastic Man as a verb. That was awesome.
Does this work on the current WordPress, 2.7? I was also wanting a family web site.
Yes, I have a site that is running 2.7 and is completely private and this particular plugin appears to be working fine with it.
Brian, are all URLs protected within the site? I have pictures that are not in wp-content/uploads and I worry that they will be publicly accessible by hitting the URL for them.
Thanks.
Hi Brian —
I’d like to restrict access to my blog, too.
But I’d like users to register their own username and password (subject to admin approval).
Do you know any good tools that intergrate well with WordPress?
I was using a package called “Deadlock”, but it’s not well supported, passwords were stored in the clear in a DB, etc etc. But functionally that’s what I was looking for.
I’m using it and quite a nice plugin. Thank you.
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It’s not working on my WordPress 2.9.2 🙁 I installed it and activated it, and when I try to access my blog, it redirects me back to the login screen again and again, it’s as if there’s an infinite redirect loop. Ironically, even when I’m logged in as the Administrator, it STILL redirects me back to the login screen. I have no other choice but to disable the plugin, are there any alternatives available?
Yeah, that is one of the issues with WordPress as an end user is that, like you, I don’t really have the ability to fix plugins, etc. when they break from WordPress updates so you end up hoping your favorite plugin remains supported or someone picks it up if the original developer abandons it.
As for alternatives for 2.9.2, it looks like Absolute Privacy may be the solution you’re looking for.
What a waste of time!! I was hoping that this type of feature will be fully enabled with WP. Why does WP throw users into dashbord when they log in??? Can anyone figure out a way to make it ‘user friendly’ ?
I agree that it should be baked into WordPress, but the developers are very conservative about what they integrate into the main trunk of the program vs. what they let people take care of with plugins.