Setting private blog in a public site

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  akuswarawsu · Member · May 25, 2017 at 6:22 am

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  How can I make all pages public but all post private? Is there a way to make the blog part of the site as ‘private’ or ‘passwrod protected’

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  otpidusprime · Member · May 25, 2017 at 10:06 am

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  Hello @akuswarawsu
  There are 2 ways in which this can be done:

  1. Make a custom private.password protected blog page:
  1. Add a new page: https://wordpress.com/page/ and name it “Blog”.
  2. On the sidebar of the Page Editor, click on the Status tab. On the Visibility section – set it Private or Password Protected.
  3. Click UPDATE.
  4. Go to My Site(s) → Customize(Beside the Themes option) or just click here: https://wordpress.com/customize/. This will open the site Customizer.
  5. On the sidebar of the Customizer click on the Menus tab.
  6. Click the Primary tab.
  7. Now, to add the blog page to the menu bar click Add Items button and select the custom blog page.
  8. Now go back and click on Static Front Page tab.
  9. On the Front page displays section select A static page.
  10. Form the Front page dropdown select the home page and from the Posts page dropdown select the blog page that you created.
  11. Finally, click Save & Publish.

  2. Set individual posts as private/password protected:
  1. Go to your blog posts page: https://wordpress.com/posts/
  2. Click Edit to edit a post.
  3. On the sidebar of the Post Editor, click on the Status tab. On the Visibility section – set it Private or Password Protected.
  4. Click UPDATE.
  5. Repeat the above steps for all posts.

  Hope these help 🙂

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  akuswarawsu · Member · May 25, 2017 at 10:57 am

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  Hi @otpidusprime

  Thank you for responding, for option 1 which sounds more efficient, but if someone typed https://wordpress.com/2017/ in the browser, would still give access to the posts as WP will show all post made in 2017, wouldn’t it?

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  otpidusprime · Member · May 26, 2017 at 8:05 am

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  but if someone typed https://wordpress.com/2017/ in the browser, would still give access to the posts as WP will show all post made in 2017, wouldn’t it?

  No, it will keep the post hidden and if some reader has direct link to these posts/pages it will show the “page not found” message once they are marked as private.

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  akuswarawsu · Member · May 30, 2017 at 3:53 am

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  That’s great, I tested it again and it works. thank you. It didn’t work must be because the browser cache.

  I only noticed that when I typed https://wordpress.com/2017/, the title of the post is sill visible, but the content is password protected.

  Is there a way to hide the title too?

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  otpidusprime · Member · Jun 6, 2017 at 10:52 am

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  Hi again @akuswarawsu
  Apologies for the delayed response.

  If you are on a Premium or Business Plan, you can use this CSS to hide the title and date/author line of the password protected posts:

  .post-password-required .entry-header {
      display: none;
  }

  More information about customizing/editing CSS can be found here: https://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-design/editing-css/

  But if you aren’t on any one of the above plans or do not want to upgrade, you can just private your post to completely hide it. i suppose there is no free way to hide the title of the posts on password protected pages.

  More information here:
  https://en.support.wordpress.com/post-visibility/