How-to: A simple Client Portal

CLIENT PORTAL / CLIENT ACCESS PAGE
I am trying to build a wp site for a company that wants their clients to be able to login and see a restricted-access, personalized page of content, links, downloads, etc. Simple enough in the real world, but quite a challenge in wp, for a newbie anyway.

I just spent the better part of the day (and night) trying to figure this out, searching the forums, google, codex, plugins.. but couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for. Some plugins were way too complex and confusing, some too limited. Well I finally did come up with something that works for me, so I wanted to share it in case it helps anyone else. Here’s what I did:

PLUGIN — Members
(By Justin Tadlock)
– create a new Role called “Client” with just “read” capability.

PLUGIN — Peter’s Login Redirect
(By Peter)
– in “specific roles” section, set redirect url for my “Client” role to “client-portal”.

USERS
– create a User for each client.
– set his Role to “Client”.

CLIENT PORTAL
– create a Client Portal page, with same url as the redirect (“client-portal”), where ALL clients will land.
– create and apply a custom page Template (in your theme) that has:
<?php
global $current_user;
get_currentuserinfo();
$page = get_page_by_title($current_user->user_login);
_e($page->post_content);
?>

INDIVIDUAL CLIENT PAGE/CONTENT
. create a child page (with Client Portal as parent) for each Client.
. set Visibility: Private, so it’s never displayed to anyone by url.
. Title must match the client’s Username!!!!
. Write the content, links to downloadable files, personalized messages, etc.

That’s it.
I think.