Adding a secure area for clients to log in to your wordpress website and access specific pages and/or categories.
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Increasingly companies are dedicating special areas of their websites specifically for their existing clients. WordPress already has a good registration system in place, and together with some plugins and a little organisation it’s a pretty simple job to develop secure client sections in your wordpress website.

How we want our client area to work.

1. We manually register a new client.
2. They are sent a username / password.
3. They login and have access to specific pages/categories containing links, downloads, etc.
4. They log out.

Protecting Pages and Categories.

As standard wordpress gives you a little control over who sees your content. Public, password protected or private. At the simplest level you could change the visibility from public to private. This will keep your content limited to registered users who are logged in – however registered users will be able to see all private content. What we want is to control the content depending on which user is logged in.

For this we’ll use the CaPa Protect plugin available here. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/capa/

Easier Login and Logout.

We don’t want our clients to login through the usual wordpress screen, so we’ll use a widget to handle the login process. Alternatively you could style the wordpress login screen to match your theme – but we prefer this method.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sidebar-login/

We also want to hide the admin bar menu from our clients, so again we’ll use another plugin to do this for us.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/global-admin-bar-hide-or-remove/

Putting it all together.

1. Make a new page for one of your clients.
2. Make a new user, scroll to bottom of the admin screen and adjust the CaPa settings to allow them access to your new page.
3. Logout and test.