Password protected sites

Question

I'm doing WP page for some small school. I wish to give some special area available just for the teachers. I created one password-protected page which works just fine. I would like to create more and use that first one just to present links to them. I set that main one as parent site to the others. It's important for me that user should be asked for the password just once.

Issues I faced with it:

1. If I protect all those pages with password (even the same one) than user is asked for it on every single page.

2. If I protect only first page than all other are visible on sitemap.xml ("Google XML Sitemaps" plugin)

3. I can exclude some categories from the sitemap but then everyone can search for that category via search bar (I use "Map Categories to Pages" plugin as well)

4. I consider to use special user for with no permissions and set those pages as "private" rather than "password protected". I didn't test if that user can open such of pages but I would have to redirect user after log-in to that main page somehow (it have to be easy to use even for those teachers who are not much into Internet stuff)

All the information there are not very secret but I would like to at least make sure it'll not pop-up somehow on some search-engine page.

I set Disallow at robots.txt for that area same as I demoted it on Google Webmaster Tools panel. At the same time I got warning from there that it's visible on my sitemap.xml.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Answer 1

The easier way can be have a group of users called teachers and give just the teacher's group the permission to visit the page.

There are many plugins for permission handling and grouping users so you'll just need to search WordPress plugin repository. Just an example: groups plugin

Another possible answer can be : multi page password protection (As I wanted to mention the answer owner, I put the link here!)

Answer 2

I think the better solution would be to create a custom page template for showing content to logged in users only and use that template to all password protected pages.

Then you can create a single user for teachers/staff members so they can log in and view content. This way they will only have to login once on website to view several pages. Even they don't need to login again on each visit.

So here is a sample template I created. It will sow content to logged in users and will display a login form to visitors.

<?php
/**
 * Template Name: Password Protected Page
 */
get_header(); ?>
    <div id="content">
        <?php
            if ( is_user_logged_in() ) :

                while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
                    get_template_part( 'content', 'page' );
                endwhile;

            else:

                $args = array(
                    'echo'           => true,
                    'redirect'       => site_url( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] ),
                    'remember'       => true,
                    'value_remember' => true
                );

                wp_login_form( $args );

            endif;
        ?>
    </div>
<?php get_footer();