WP eMember Content Protection Not Working – Common Mistakes

[amin007]

Most of the “content protection not working” related issues stem from incorrect setup. This post has a step by step checklist/explanation that should help you identify the setup issue so you can resolve it.

1. Understanding the “Access To” field when you create a particular membership level

Checking the checkboxes in the “Access To” field do not give the member access to all content. It simply allows you to customize the content protection (eg. access to certain posts or pages) via the Manage Content Protection menu. This field comes in handy if you want to quickly lock down your site’s protected content for a particular membership level in one click. So, in normal situation you should have these checkboxes checked otherwise the protected content won’t be accessible to anyone.

2. Understanding How the Content Protection Works

The following documentation explains this in details (there is also a video tutorial):

http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-membership/how-to-manage-content-protection-in-wp-emember-15

Basically, you first set which content should be protected from anonymous (non logged-in users) in the “General Protection” dropdown on the “Manage Content Protection” menu. Then, you select your membership level and check the posts, pages, categories that you want that membership level to be able to see.

3. Understanding Category Protection

This where most users make the mistake. The category protection takes precedence over the normal individual post protection. Say for example, you have a post called “A” which belongs to category “X”. If you have given access to category “X” for a certain membership level then it doesn’t matter what protection you apply to post “A” individually. So, if you want to individually protect post “A” then do not apply any kind of protection to the category that this post belongs to.

The category protection method offers you flexibility and allows you to bulk protect posts that belong to a certain category which is nice but it also means that you need to pay extra attention when you mix category protection and individual post protection.

When you first start, a good strategy is to decide one way of protection (either via category or individual post) then stick to it(without mixing both kind of protection) until you get more familiar with the plugin.

4. Update the Protection Settings of the Correct Post or Page

When protecting a particular post or page, make sure you are updating the protection settings of the appropriate post or page that you think you are updating. Sometimes if you have multiple posts or pages with similar names, it is easy for your brain to miss that you are actually updating the protection settings of another page and wondering why the protection is not working.

You can always take an step back and do the following easy test to see if you are making such a mistake:

1. Create a brand new WordPress page (for testing purpose)

2. Apply some protection settings to this page

3. Log in as a member with the correct membership level

4. Check the page created in step 1 to see if the protection is working as you expect it to.

5. Some Related Posts

Here are some related forum post links that might give you clues in solving the protection setup issue you are having:

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/emember-content-protection-free-member

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/protection-setup

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/protection-is-not-working

https://support.tipsandtricks-hq.com/forums/topic/manual-assignment-of-a-new-lvel-fails

[Author]

Posts