WordPress 1.2: Per-Post User Level Restrictions
One of the recurring complaints against WordPress is that its only means of "protecting" posts is by password, which means that everyone knows a private post exists — including the title, post data and time — but only the "select few" get to read it. LiveJournal users can restrict post visibility to their friends list; and other blog packages with more granular access controls can restrict posts in various ways.
I've created a modification for WordPress 1.2 that allows authors to select a minimum user level required to see posts. If a user is logged in, and of sufficient level, they see the post. If the user is not logged, or not of sufficient level, they see no indication that private posts exist: nothing on the index, search, syndication feeds, or calendar display.
June 3rd, 2004 at 1:29 am
oh, i'd love to use this! however, after quickly skimming the directions to implement, there's a lot of changes to be made… i would love this to be made into a plugin.
June 3rd, 2004 at 8:19 am
There is a plugin available that acheives much the same result:
http://wordpress.org/support/10/6059
http://www.furbona.org/viewlevel.html
The major distinction with the plugin, though, is that restricted posts are pulled from the database but then not displayed to the user. My modification changes the actual database calls, ensuring that restricted posts aren't ever requested form the database. On a high-volume site (or a lower-powered one) I suspect my modification will produce better performance, since only data that is used is fetched from the database. Wyzewoman's plugin method will result in wasted database calls and wasted memory consumption.
October 7th, 2004 at 3:59 pm