How can I make my custom templates respect permissions?

Question

I use the Members plugin to manage permissions on my site. For standard templates, it works great - when the user doesn't have permission to see a page, they get the following message:

Sorry, but you do not have permission to view this content.

How can I make sure I still get this message in my custom templates? Which tag do I need to include?

EDIT. Template source:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Stats
*/
?>


<?php
get_header();
?>

<div id="main">

<div id="contentwrapper">
  <div class="topPost">
    <h2 class="topTitle"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
    <div class="topContent">
      <p>Listeners are counted every minute. The green line is the <b>maximum</b> during any given time period. The red area is the <b>average</b> number of listeners during the same time period.</p>
      <h3>Listeners over the last hour</h3>
      <img class="alignnone" title="Listeners over the last hour" src="<?php echo get_graph(60,60); ?>" alt="" width="481" height="149" />
      <hr/>
      <h3>Listeners over the last day</h3>
      <img class="alignnone" title="Listeners over the last day" src="<?php echo get_graph(3600,24); ?>" alt="" width="481" height="149" />
      <hr/>
      <h3>Listeners over the last week</h3>
      <img class="alignnone" title="Listeners over the last week" src="<?php echo get_graph(86400,7); ?>" alt="" width="481" height="149" />
    </div>
    <div class="cleared"></div>
  <div class="cleared"></div>
  </div> <!-- Closes topPost -->
</div> <!-- Closes contentwrapper-->

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<div class="cleared"></div>

</div><!-- Closes Main -->


<?php get_footer(); ?>

Note: The purpose of this template is to act as a front end for a shell script. Any content on the database is irrelevant, so there's no loop. (Though including a dummy loop didn't seem to help.)

Answer 1

Message you quoted is being generated by members_content_permissions_protect() function. By default it is used as a filter on the_content() and the_excerpt() functions. Since your custom template doesn't use these - there is no case for function to run.

Try something like this in template:

$content = 'Content to protect';
echo members_content_permissions_protect( $content );

Another idea:

$protected = members_content_permissions_protect( false );

if( false !== $protected ) {

    echo $protected;
}
else {

    //template stuff goes here
}

Answer 2

You can use the userlevels system, youc an find more information on roles levels and capabilities here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities

See here for how the old 'roles' map onto the user levels system:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities#User_Levels

You can further define in your templates wether a user of a given role can view a page or not using the following:

global $current_user;

get_currentuserinfo();

if ($current_user->user_level < 8) {
    // stuff that is only visible to users lower than level 8
}

Also bear in mind:

if ( is_user_logged_in() ) { ... }

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/is_user_logged_in

Using these you should be able to control who can see what, and at what level of access they need to see it