The message Please Log In appears whenever a user tries to access a member-only page without logging in. There are various ways users can try to bypass logging in such as:

  • Bookmarking pages for future reference
  • Using the web browser’s history
  • Guessing the page’s URL (address on the Web)
    This option is not difficult because every page has an URL that is based on the page’s title. See the Note about Page Titles and Slugs for more details. The browser’s location bar displays the URL of the page it is currently displaying.

When the Please Log In message appears is controlled by a conditional element called Member Only Page. The LLIR website contains far more member-only pages than public pages, so the Member Only Page element applies first to all pages and then selects public pages for exclusion. Therefore, you must add each new public page to the list of exclusions, regardless of whether the link to that page is a an option in the public menu or an in-page link.

Notes

  • In the content of the Member Only Page element is the title Please Log In followed by white space. This conditional element is not a designed to foil determined hackers. Users can see the page content by scrolling down, but they cannot see the member menu. The the intention is to encourage members to login every time they return to the website.
  • Changing the list of exclusions involves modifying the settings for the conditional element, not its content. To modify the content of a conditional element, edit it like an ordinary page.

Instructions

  1. From the WordPress Dashboard, open the Appearance menu and select Elements.
  2. Locate the element Member Only Page. Select Edit from the options under the element name.
  3. When the element opens for editing, click the Element Settings icon to the immediate right of the Update button.
  4. On the Element Settings panel, click the down arrowhead to the right of Display Settings to expand those settings. Note that option Show On: All Singular is selected, indicating that the element applies to all pages in the website.
  5. Click the down arrowhead to the right of Exclude Settings. The panel should look like the image shown on the right.
  6. Note that options Hide On: Single Pages and Select Page By: Individually are selected. At the the time of this writing, all 15 pages in the public area are excluded for this conditional element. Therefore, the Please Log In message never appears in the public area of the website.
  7. To exclude another page, click the Select Items box to see a Select Items view that looks similar to the image below. Read the brief description of this view beside the image and then return to step 8.
  8. The easiest way to locate a specific page is to enter its title into the Search box in the panel on the left and press Enter/Return. Doing that reduces the list on the right to only pages that contain the words you entered into the search box.
    • Instead of doing a search, you can look through the list of all pages.
  9. Select the page you want to exclude and click the Select button.
  10. When the main editing panel appears again, confirm that the number of selected pages has increased by 1.
  11. Click the Update button above the words Element Settings to save the updated exclusion list.
  12. Test: The recommended way to to test is to open a different browser and enter the website as a user who is not logged in. Then:
    • Navigate to the new page. You should see the page contents and not the Please Log In message.
    • It is a good idea to also check that you can still open all public pages without logging in and that the message still appears in the member-only area.

Selecting Items for Exclusion from the Member Only Element

In the right side of the Select Items view, you see a scrolling list of all the pages in the website. Pages already excluded from the conditional element have a yellow background.
In the left side is a Search box.
To see only pages currently excluded from the conditional element, click View Selected Items to the left of the Select button in the lower right corner. When only selected items are listed, you can click the X on the right of a page title to remove that page from the list of exclusions or use the up and down arrowheads to temporarily reorder the list.
Click Browse Items to the left of the Select button on the lower right to return the view of all pages shown here.