Out of the box, all of your content is visible, unless your site (or parts of it) are being a paywall (think members only), set to private or protected from public viewing in some other manner. With these two amazing free plugins from the WordPress Plugin Repository, you can selectively show or hide some of the content on your site. This week, I am putting together training for these plugins.
Display Widgets
Let's say you have a registration widget, which you only want to show to non-logged in users or a Widget with information only for logged in users, or every a widget you will show to everyone, but only in certain pages or posts on your site. This plugin will allow you to do all of those amazing things. You can choose where the widget will appear/not appear: front page, blog, single posts, certain pages, categories, post types, post type archives, taxonomies and even by page id. This can prove rather useful, especially if your theme does not offer a way to selectively display a widget.
Nav Menu Roles
Along with selectively showing widgets, Nav Menu Roles allows for selectively showing menu items. Keep in mind, this is for custom menus created under Appearance > Menu in the WordPress backend. You can choose everyone, logged in user or logged out. Using the logged in user option, you can (as the plugin name suggests), select specific user roles to see those show the menu items. This is great, especially for member sites, where only members of a certain level should see a menu item.
We will look at these plugins, what each offers and even some ways to use them defectively.