There are many different ways to protect your content. For this client, he simply wanted to capture people’s email address before they could read the content. Seems simple, but there was multiple articles that needed to be protected and what if people came back? We didn’t want people to have to submit their info all over again.
The basics of this plan include a form to capture name and email, have that info sent to Mailchimp (or another email marketing company), and then have people automatically logged in so they could read content immediately without having to then login, or check their email for a link. One down side (or is it?) is that everyone will now become users (subscribers) on your backend.
Here’s the plugins that we’ll be using:
- Members
- Enable/Disable Auto Login when Register
- Simple Login-Logout Shortcode
- Gravity Forms (paid)
- GF User Registration add-on (need elite license)
- GF Mailchimp add-on
You’ll need to make sure these are all installed.
Get Started
- The first thing to do is to install Gravity Forms and set up the information that you want to collect before people can read your article. Usually that will be name and email address, although you can configure more fields if you so desire.
- Next, install the Mailchimp add-on and make sure it’s integrated with your Mailchimp account. If you’re not sure how to do that, check out this video.
- Next, install the User Registration add-on and set up the feed. If you’re not sure how to do that, find the documentation here.
Protect Your Pages
At the bottom of each page now in the dashboard, you’ll notice this new box for Content Permissions:
For each page or post that you want to protect, simply check “Subscriber” under the Roles tab. Then go to the Error Message tab. From there, choose the Text tab and type in what you want people to see above your form.
- Include the login/logout shortcode that you can get from the plugin we just installed.
- Include the shortcode for the Gravity Form you created
You can see what I decided to include below:
Adding this will make it look like this on the front end for anyone not logged in:
Once you’ve done that, just be sure to save the changes you’ve made and you should be all set. Once people fill out the form they will be automatically logged in (because of that plugin we installed) and they will be able to see the content. Keep in mind that you will be able to see all content when you are logged in, but if you log out, the content will have that form over the top of it.
Be sure to test!
Every setup is a little different and you’ll want to make sure you’ve set up everything you need. Have some different emails to test this with. If you have a gmail address, you can use a + or dots to create test emails. See how to do that here.
If this works for you, I’d love to hear about it! Good luck!
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