Force Login to View WordPress Blog Pages

Discussion

1. Ahmed Samir

   I like the handy solution. However, there’s a number of plugins for this that allows more customization like a custom page/text and redirection etc….
2. Joseph McCullough

   Pretty nifty snippet, thanks.
3. KMB

   There is a pretty useful function for that, called is_user_logged_in(), which does exactly what you might think it might do.

   I am not sure if the location you specified in the header might give problems if blog uses the so-called SEO-friendly URLs like “blog.com/foo/bar/” for posts and/or pages. So in order to prevent bad redirections, there is also a WordPress function called wp_login_url(), which brings us to this untested snippet:

   if (!is_user_logged_in()) {
       header('Location: '.wp_login_url(get_permalink()));
       exit;
   }
   
• Joseph McCullough

  That seems much more flexible, awesome!
• Marcaum54

  Ty man, just what i needed ;)
4. Boris

   You could also place this in your functions.php file:

   function walled_garden()
   {
   	if( ! is_user_logged_in() )
   		wp_redirect( '/wp-login.php' );
   }
   add_action( 'get_header', 'walled_garden' );
   
• alfatron

  Thanks Boris!!
• Ramon Fincken

  Excellent Boris.
5. Avinash

   I think we also need to check for is_admin().
   I am not sure is_user_logged_in() will return true in case of admin logged in. What you think?
• KMB

  Because the admin is an user, it will return true, if he/she is logged in. I checked the function for it to be true. As a matter of fact is_user_logged_in() does almost the same as David suggested above. It gets the user-details and checks if the ID equals 0.
6. Avi

   @KMB: thx KMB for explaining…
7. S Hamzah

   Hello. Thanks for this.

   It works fine for me, until I try to recover my password. It seems like the password lost and found link is considered as other url, so it still redirected to login page. Is it just me or do we need to add some more snippets?
8. Tim

   I get this error when I use the code above.

   Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/content/92/7103392/html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/twentyten/venue_event_add.php:6) in /home/content/92/7103392/html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/twentyten/venue_event_add.php on line 23

   Any suggestions?
9. Tim

   Resolved warning by adding this line below to the functions.php located in what theme you are using.

   ob_start();
10. Steven Woolston

    Hi David. Great post and it answers part of my question.

    Furthermore, can the loop be customised to only show posts that are of a specific type? I am wondering if I can use WordPress as a way to communicate with clients based on their login and only show posts that are targeted at their company/login. Like a bug tracker of sorts.

    Thanks
    Steven
11. Steve Pringle

    The plugin you linked to hasn’t been updated in a few years so your tip I hope will be helpful for our college’s website over the holidays while we move to WordPress.
12. Abe

    So, when I used the plugin suggested in a WPMU, all the pages were put behind the login wall… this code worked like a charm because I only wanted to cut access to a single sub blog … so put it in that sub blog theme … :) thanks !
13. Nick

    Where would you recommend putting this code so that it runs ALWAYS? I get the 404 error if I try and access a page that doesn’t exist. I would rather redirect to login and only show 404 if the user is logged in. Of course I want this for all errors, so I don’t want to just add it to the 404 page too. Any suggestions on a more global place to put it other than the template header?