WordPress Protected Page Redirects to PDF

Question

I am wondering if it is possible to redirect a user after they enter a password on a password protected page to a PDF?

So instead of showing the content of that page, I'd like to just load a PDF in the browser window. I would rather not embed the PDF on the WordPress page.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Because the_content doesn't even process until the password has been successfully entered, you can add a shortcode that redirects the page, that shortcode will run only with good password. So, something like the following should work:

add_shortcode( 'pdf_redirect', function ( $atts ) {
    $a = shortcode_atts( array(
        'url' => '',
    ), $atts );

    // instructions in case of misuse
    if (empty($a['url']))
        return "<pre>Please assign a destination for the PDF redirect, [pdf_redirect url='https://yourpdfurl...']</pre>";

    return "
    <meta http-equiv='refresh' content='0; url={$a['url']}'>
    <script>
        window.location.href = '{$a['url']}';
    </script>
    <p>If your browser hasn't redirected you, please <a href='{$a['url']}'>click here</a>.</p>";
} );

And then on your password protected page, the content is:

[pdf_redirect url="http://example.com/file.pdf"]

The meta refresh is bad coding standards, but all browsers support it and it works. The javascript is fallback redirect, and the html link is double-fallback. Now you could make the redirect happen before the document headers by tapping into a early hook like wp_loaded, seeing if the user has proper password with a function or two, and interpret the $post->post_content shortcodes yourself then properly redirecting with wp_redirect() - but the lazy way I've done works too.