{"id":105,"date":"2011-02-22T21:34:41","date_gmt":"2011-02-23T04:34:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.joshualyman.com\/?p=105"},"modified":"2011-05-06T12:14:20","modified_gmt":"2011-05-06T18:14:20","slug":"how-to-make-a-family-wordpress-blog-private","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joshualyman.com\/2011\/02\/how-to-make-a-family-wordpress-blog-private\/","title":{"rendered":"How to make a family WordPress blog private"},"content":{"rendered":"
My wife and I, like any fun newlywed couple (okay, maybe we’re getting a little old for the newlywed stage now), have a blog where we like to talk about the trips we go on, fun finds, time with family, etc. The time came the other day to make the blog private to allow access only to friends and family, instead of shouting our family matters to the entire Internet. It is run with WordPress<\/a>, as are most of my personal and client sites, because of the fantastic power and flexibility that the platform provides. After searching for a few hours, I came up with what I believe is one a very good combo of plugins and settings to make a WordPress blog private.<\/p>\n We didn’t want any old Joe Schmoe to stumble across our family news and personal lives. WordPress will let you make individual posts password protected, and there are even plugins that will set a default password on every post. However, we had a lot of pictures and other content in sidebars and such that would not be protected by such a method. WordPress also allows people to sign up as “subscribers” to a blog, and there are a myriad of plugins that will block access to the site unless you log in as a user. However, this would require all of our friends and family to make yet another account on yet another site, remember their credentials, and basically be a pain. Therefore, this solution, and all plugins with it, wouldn’t work.<\/p>\n We wanted to mimic private blogs on services such as Blogger, where the owner of the site can list the emails of people that are allowed to see the site, and then in the case of Blogger, people must authenticate using their Google account to view the site. This is a good approach, but weren’t going to deal with authenticating via the Google API either, too much work. We just wanted to have a list of people that we trusted that could view the site.<\/p>\n Enter the Friends Only<\/em> and Feed Wrangler<\/em> plugins. This combination of plugins allows you to protect your entire site, not just posts, as well as your RSS feeds.<\/p>\nThe Problem:<\/h4>\n
The Goal:<\/h4>\n
The Solution:<\/h4>\n