Have I missed the point of WordPress?

What you are describing is the administrative area of WordPress. With almost every CMS, the administrative area of the site is where you go edit and maintain your content.

You can set up a site which restricts “front end” user access — there’s several plugins to help you do this, for example:
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/user-access-manager/

Hi @imtiazullah – Yes, you see correctly. I know what you mean, you’d like users to be able to feel like they are on your branded website, not in the WordPress admin.

Drupal does it the way you want, but I worked with Drupal for 2 years after which I decided WordPress was much better for almost everything, at least for my needs. I actually found one of the problems with theming the admin is that your admin really needs to work well, and Drupal themers would rarely put the effort into making the admin work like users need so we’d always switch back to the default theme for the admin anyway.

Not sure exactly what you are looking for since you did not describe you use-case but what might meet your needs is the BuddyPress plugin for WordPress. BuddyPress is one of the few “official” plugins so it’s one I think you can depend on if it meets your needs.

Hope this helps.

-Mike

I ‘ve created a test login account (subscriber)…
…When I log in, I was expecting to see the same website, i.e template with the same login pages (I was working on hiding pages until logged in) and to my amazement I was greeted with the bland standard wordpress and dashboard

These two plugins work very well together to;

a) direct users where you want them to go after login based on their user role or user name and

b) removing all but their user profile (at the subscriber level) if they do go to the dashboard.

Peter’s Login Redirect

WP Hide Dashboard

Hi all, thanks for the quick responses.

@mikeschinkel – Effectively, I’m after the following:
My website is running under a template (free or purchased but irrelevant for now).
I want to administer the website from my normal wordpress ‘back end’ admin page, this is fine as is currently.
I want the ability for users to come to my templated site, create a user account (save this to the wp database) and then have additional pages available on login which are hidden until authenticated.
The user, once they have an account, should be able to login to my site and stay within the realms of the template and available pages, NOT the ‘back end’ dashboard wp stuff.

Does that make sense?
Thanks alot for your input!
Immy

Hi @imtiazullah – Sure, makes sense. Still don’t know what the site’s about or why users would add pages (it sometimes helps to understand these things) but if BuddyPress doesn’t work for you I think @zota and @claytonjames gave you some places to start.

-Mike

Ah – sorry Mike. Didn’t know that’s what you were after.
I’m basically going to have an online training website.
Until the user registers, they will only have access to the homepage, and maybe a contact, about etc.. the norm! ??

Once registered (or logged in) they will be greeted with an additional page (or 2) which will allow them to effectively book courses. The additional page(s) will be the course availability.

Immy

FYI, here is the built-in WordPress function that allows you to create a login-link that will redirect the user wherever you want:

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/wp_login_url

I think i actually have the same question. Let me try to explain from my point of view.
Currently I have a site that runs on joomla. I have been looking into word press but can not find the same user access option as joomla. let me explain. This site is an online gaming community. that plays a game against other “family’s” When anyone comes to the site they are met with a brief explanation of the site and the “family” and have a few choices as far as links. Now when someone becomes a member of the site the admin must first accept thief registration and then when they login they have access to several chat-rooms as well as other very useful tools for playing the game. There are also downloads and pictures available only to members.

On the front end of the website there are three levels of access for content; public, Registered and Special. public is obvious, its visible to anyone, registered content is only visible to those who’s registration has been accepted by the admin, and special content is only visible to the site admins. there are actually several user levels that fall into special but basically anyone who has access to post or edit content.

Is this type of user access achievable through wordpress?

yep – you’re pretty much in the same boat as me! ??
I have however, more or less, managed to workaround the issues usinga number of plugins and a bit of web d’ment at my own expense.

@tenrdrmer,
There are Membership plugins that might suit your needs, these hide post or pages or you can have teasers that hide parts of a post or pages from non registered subscribers.

wp-member and s3menber are paid offerings, these are only suggestions not recommendations.

These have levels you can set, also there is download monitor that allows member only downloads for support files, between the two restricted pages with downloads in the posts, I do use this one on my websites download page.

That might be the direction to look at.

HTH

David