How to make the blog private

If you want to restrict access to seeing the blog at all, use a .htaccess and .htpasswd file.
As for individual entries, sorry, can’t help you…

You can also restrict it through your cpanel. Then only people you choose can see the entire blog. Either use a blanketed user name/password or individual ones.

southerngal, thanks for your help.
I can’t see how I can configure this in control panel. Could you pls elaborate it a little bit?
thanks alot

I was talking about your cpanel you have through your hosting company. That’s what you are talking about as well, right? It’s pretty simple, you just go to the control panel, find web protect and select the directory you want to password. Fill in the user name and password and click add. This is for cpanel 4 and higher.

2 problems with this method of making a private blog:

1. users must log in to see the blog, then log in again if they want to post or edit anything
2. if you want a private blog with dozens of users, you must create dozens of user accounts for the blog’s folder in cpanel.

why isn’t public/private a built-in option for wp?

I use a plugin called private categories. It seems to work for me. You can set the category you want to keep private and associate it with a user level.

jimtobias – because by their nature, blogs are supposed to be open. If you want to keep the entire site private, then the security has to be ouside of WP to prevent the user from getting anywhere near it.

FYI: The users created in CPanel don’t correlate to the users in WP, so you could create one user in CPanel, give that name & password to everyone, then create the individiual users in WP. And yes, they would have to first login to the site using the CPanel user you give them, and then again into WP itself.

-tg

You may find this useful. The blog is only visable for its registered users https://dev.wp-plugins.org/browser/registered-only/
by Carthik Sharma