Password protecting content

Wordpress has some built-in features that make restricting content to certain visitors easy. This is a great way to provide clients with a private way to review content or do proofing.

When editing a post or page, look for your "Visibility" box and click on the link to the right of it.

The default setting is for your post/page to be "Public", or accessible to anyone who visits your blog. You can also set a post/page to be "private" or "password protected".

Private - A private post/page is only visible to someone visiting the site who is logged in as an administrator. Unless you've set up your blog to have multiple users that are posting, that would just be you. Search engines will not see pages that are set to Private.

Password Protected - If you select this option, viewers will be prompted to enter a password to view the content.

• If this content is a Post, it will appear within the normal flow of your blog, but everywhere that the content would normally be displayed there will be a field to enter a password instead. This way, only people that you have given the unique password for that post/page will be able to view the content.
  
• If this content is a Page, it will not be linked to on your site unless you specifically provide a link to the content (e.g., in a Navigation Menu Bar, etc.) or if you use an 'automatic' link type somewhere on your site. (e.g., a link type which lists all of your Pages, etc.) This is a great option when regular site viewers should not be aware the content exists unless they have a link to the Page. Some photographers use this for client proofing.
  
  Optionally, you could create another Page to provide links to each of the individual client content pages, or you could use Menu Links to provide an easy way to access these pages right from the Navigation Menu Bar!

Special note: If you are able to view a protected page/post without having to provide a password, you may have already signed into the page/post before and your browser has 'remembered' your login. Clear your web browser cache to confirm, but if you see "Protected" in your page/post Title, the WordPress system will require a password to view the content.

Password protection and ProPhoto layouts

Be aware that when you password protect a post or page, only the WordPress content of the post/page will be protected. Anything created in the ProPhoto layout applied to that post/page will still be visible. So for example, if you created a specific layout for a password protected page, all of the modules added to that layout would still be visible on the page, without entering a password. Module content can not be password protected.

If you would like to password protect an entire page, including the ProPhoto layout, we would suggest a WordPress plugin, like this one.

What you can do with that plugin is set up a new "subscriber" user in the "Users > All Users" area. Then, you can use the plugin's controls to make that page only available to those subscriber users. That way, if anyone wants to view the page you intend to protect entirely, they would need to login to your site with that subscriber user and only then would the page be visible to them. Otherwise, that page would not be visible at all publicly.

Embedded password protected galleries

When you create a ProPhoto gallery, you will see the option to password protect it, just like a post or page, since these galleries are a custom post type for WordPress purposes. That way, when viewing the gallery directly, a password would need to be entered to view it.

However, if a password protected gallery is embedded into a WordPress page, or is selected to display via a galleries module in a ProPhoto layout, the gallery will be fully visible in that page or ProPhoto  layout; no password will be required to view the gallery. If your intention is to protect the gallery from display, you would need to password protect the WordPress page as well (as described above), or just link directly to the password protected gallery itself.